Saturday, March 31, 2007

making room for the orchard--part one

we put in our order for fruit trees last week and they should arrive in early may. so, we have about four weekends to work on clearing a place to plant them.

we ordered 26 trees but two are cold hardy figs and will go up by the house. the remainder are apple, plum, pear, and sweet cherry. oh, and i did get two cold hardy apricots as well. can you tell i have aspirations for jam and preserve making?

last year we planted about a dozen dwarf fruit trees around the perimeter of the backyard (and three sour cherries in an area that the sheep helped clear). there are no trees around the house--no permanent landscaping whatsoever actually--so we thought we would use edible landscaping to spruce things up a bit. of course, it will be years before the trees grow tall and look pretty but i am content with the wait knowing it will be lovely to have fruit trees right in the backyard.

today was the first day we busted out our brand new chipper shredder and chainsaw. we made these large purchases as our christmas gifts and have been anxiously awaiting the time when we would put them to use.














so, here is the back field before we started.....















a couple hours into it......















and at quitting time....














the pictures don't really show it but you can now actually see the stone wall that borders our entire property. not bad for one day of work by two people (married people at that!).

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am so jealous. i have wanted fruit trees and one of those chipper shredder things since before we moved out here and i still don't have one.

rooster said...

i know, a chipper shredder is a huge luxury! it is literally the only piece of equipment we own plus the chainsaw. around here everything is hand tools, wheelbarrows, and sweat. no tractor, no manure spreader. someday the donkeys may start doing some of the work but that is a distant someday.

MikaJ said...

need any help planting those trees?!

rooster said...

come on up! (bring your shovel)

i got some cool copper tags that we can imprint w/ the tree variety.

should i get a load of gravel delivered for old time's sake? incase the neighbors need some more entertaining!

MikaJ said...

oh man...gravel. and maybe a few sleds so we can load up and haul it around. remember we were so tired that we were falling over and fox would be like "why don't you treat yourselves to a tea break"? hahahah

El said...

LOVE the chipper shredder. Yours looks pretty hardcore. Ours is pretty decent, but what makes me nuts is it really reduces things to NOTHING so here I am thinking I can get a ton of shredded stuff to put on the garden paths but NO that 14:1 ratio really works.

You guys worked pretty hard there! Good luck with the fruit trees. Yum.

rooster said...

el, you are so right. i was like---the things we'll do with all of these wood chips! after all of those trees i fed into that thing we had two small piles!