Our trees came from the Arbor Day Society today, a long thin box with twigs that are, supposedly, alive. You're supposed to plant them right away, so I did. We found a nice, untouched spot behind the barn ("organic machine house", to people who keep up with these things). The hose didn't reach to water them, so we had to haul water: I with my bucket marked "toilet" (it was the best bucket I could find- don't ask), BAH with his milk jugs, and Little Z with her sand pale full of water. Little Z was watering rocks and the like, but BAH and I were watering our new trees:
one early harvest apple,
one yellow delicious apple,
two montmorency cherries*,
two kiefer pears,
two orient pears (pears are my favorite fruit),
two golden jubilee peach (I can't believe you can grow peaches in Wisconsin! We'll see...), and
three pecan seedlings (for protein, as Roses commented once).
Pictures of the "orchard" coming soon. (Although you may not be able to discern the trees as yet!)
* The first house BAH and I lived in together was really a trailer, and it had beautiful cherry trees along the edge of the yard. We weren't allowed to pick the cherries for ourselves, though; that honor went to our landlord, Art, who sat underneath the cherry trees in his lawn chair with a handgun and shot birds who tried to eat his cherries. Art told BAH not to tell me it was a gun- as though I couldn't just look out my window and see him sitting there in his lawn chair twenty feet away, shooting birds with his gun.
We can get nets to put over our cherry trees to protect them.
My last apartment was actually a townhouse with a nice large yard. In the back yard were a row of peach trees, a nut tree of some sort (I never did figure out which nut it was), and a few of those cherry trees. The day the cherries became ripe, the birds would pick them clean in a matter of hours. It was amazing. The squirrels did the same thing with the peaches. I never did get any fruit.
ReplyDeleteI'm so excited about your orchard. I can't wait to see pictures.
My mum's side of the family were fruit farmers and still have an orchard. Good luck and watch out for the berrybugs!
ReplyDeleteI grew up in Illinois (I don't know if you knew that)...anyway, some of the best peaches I've ever had came from Michigan, so I'm pretty sure peaches in Wisconsin is totally possible.
ReplyDeleteI'm jealous, I want fruit trees! :)