5 New Fruit Trees

I spent my Monday morning doing some yardwork. I finished doing some weeding and edging on the flower beds on the front and side of our house...the ground is soft because of all of the rain we've had, so both tasks were very easy. I also spent sometime in the orchard, driving stakes into the ground so I could train down the branches of our fruit trees. I went to a seminar about orchard maintenance about a year ago at a local Country Living Expo. The gentleman who taught the seminar is an expert with fruit trees and he explained that branches that are horizontal product more fruit than branches which grow vertically. It has to do with the way that the tree sends sap into it's limbs and blossoms. It is easiest to train the branches to grow horizontally when the tree is young and the branches have not yet hardened. The trees in our orchard are young, so we are focusing more on training them than on pruning. It was a great workshop, I'm hoping to take it again this winter.So Saturday we went to a local nursery and picked out five new fruit trees:

Sweet Heart Cherry and a Variety Cherry (it has four varieties grafted to it),

Red Nectarine, Nijiseiki Pear, and Jonagold Apple.

At the nursery the trees are in sawdust, so they come home bare rooted.

We haven't been overly particular about the spacing of the trees in our orchard, but they do all have a 15' to 20' radius around them...it's been easier to make this kind of space for our newer trees because the husband has removed several junk trees (alders). The alders had been a problem from the start, they shaded the orchard from sunlight, took over the soil with their roots, and were the source of pests and disease that have harmed our trees.
Having the excavator on our tractor makes it much easier to put the trees in the ground. Before we had the tractor it used to take a while to dig holes big enough for the root balls. The process is much quicker now.

In some areas our soil is very clay-like, so for new trees it is helpful to mix in some of the soil used in the raised beds in the vegetable garden. I even mixed in a bit of chicken manure to as fertilizer - the manure was a few months old. Fresh manure is hot and could burn the tree's roots.

Just as we were putting the last tree into the ground it began to rain.

But then of course part of the sky cleared to let the sun through and I caught this picture of the rainbow...kind of a nice sign for our new trees.