Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Monday, May 23, 2011

Backyard mini-orchard

This weekend, in addition to harvesting a ton of greens and herbs, I planted some fruit trees and hardened off some plants. I'm doing a long slow hardening off of my tomato plants and need to acquire some more for the bed I built. I also started hardening off the pumpkin plants I started inside a few weeks ago. I think I went a little crazy with the pumpkins because I have something like 24 pumpkins plants going.

As for planting, I planted 6 fruit trees. This is from the batch that I ordered a month or so ago. Two of them didn't come because the nursery deemed they "didn't look good" enough. But, in the end I planted:

1 cherry
1 plum
1 peach
1 nectarine
2 pears

That brings all my fruit trees/bushes/plants to the following:

2 dwarf cherries
2 columnar apples
2 dwarf pears
1 dwarf nectarine
1 dwarf peach
1 dwarf plum
1 Peter's Honey Fig

Plus:
2 blueberries
4 blackberries
30 strawberries
3 grape vines

I also planted some flowers in the front yard. My sunflowers are popping up through the ground and, hopefully, won't get trampled much more by the kids.

Do you have any fruit trees in your yard? What's your favorite?

16 comments:

Alice said...

Wow, you've got quite an orchard going on there!! We've got 2 apples, 1 fig, 1 lemon, 1 lime, 1 orange, 1 asian pear and 1 pear. A ton of blackberries too. My favorite at our old place was the lemon tree - hands down! We just planted the new tree so it will be a while before I'm knee deep in lemonade but I look forward to it!

Hazel said...

We have espaliered Morello cherry, peach and apricot, 2 teeny dwarf apples, 1 plum and a medlar. I have a kiwi, Japanese Wineberry and some soft fruit too.
I don't know about a favourite. Maybe the medlar because you can't buy the fruit in the shops? But ask me again when the peaches are ripe...

Mike Ginn said...

One Satsuma and one Blueberry. Picking Blueberries now. Satsuma dropped all it's fruit for some reason a few weeks ago. Probably due to drought.

Also have 200 pecan trees on family land.

Mike
Baton Rouge

Oldnovice said...

Two raspberry and one blackberry bush(es), two peach trees, and the latest was/is a Mother's Day/Birthday gift from my son of two Pistachio trees.

Do you have more than a city lot of space?

Yart said...

I have a 5 in 1 apple and a 4 in 1 pear, lemon, lime, orange and fig. This is the first year for them so I'm not sure if I like them yet or not... LOL! I have 3 blueberry bushes and about 45 strawberry, 2 grape vines and a demented rhubarb.

Anonymous said...

How big is your yard, Crunchy?

Chile said...

We planted a few fruit trees this year and, after watching the great videos on Dave Wilson's Nursery sit about backyard orchards, plan to order and plant some bare root additional trees this winter.

Crunchy Chicken said...

Ack! I forgot about my grapes - we have 3 grape vines.

Mike - I'm jealous of your pecan trees.

Oldnovice - No, we have something like 1/10 of an acre? Our lot is big, but our house is smack dab in the middle and cuts it in two. We have a huge wasteland of lawn in the front (to be removed shortly) with only the fig out there. All our edibles are in the backyard.

Chile - Yes, I watched all those as well. All the trees I planted were bare root.

Stephanie - Green Stay at Home Mom said...

I am so jealous! We rent, but we're still thinking about asking the landlord if we could plant a fruit tree, just on the off chance we're here long enough to get the benefits. We hope to move close to family soon, but a tree planted is a good thing to my mind either way.

Greenpa said...

and just what WERE you thinking, with 24 pumpkin plants? :-)

Crunchy Chicken said...

Greenpumpkin - Because Rouge Vif d'Etampes make the best pumpkin pies.

And, with WA state's new cottage industries law being passed, maybe I'll be hawking pumpkin bread out of the back gate this year :)

Anonymous said...

I love that you have so many fruit trees/bushes. I am slowly adding more each year. So far I have 1 lemon, 1 red navel orange, 1 satsuma, 2 apple (Anna and Dorsett Golden), 1 plum (but the other one died...so no cross-pollination happening for now) 4 blueberries, 1 blackberry, 1 raspberry and 4 new strawberries. I ripped out my old strawberry bed this year and plan to repopulate with the runners from the four new plants in the fall. This is the first year I will get some red navel oranges! :) No lemons yet and everything else are just babies.

Prairiemom said...

No fruit trees yet. The best place to put a mini orchard currently has a swing set on it. So, My orchard will have to wait a few more years. I do have strawberries, raspberries, and I am trying blue berries again. Can't ever have enough berry plants, my produce never makes it into the house, my kids graze all summer long!

Desert Lean-to said...

I'm impressed with all of your fruit in the city. We have one of each, semi-dwarf: Wealthy apple, Garnet Peach, Green Gauge Plum and Chinese apricot. We also have 4 grapevines. Our lot (including the house) is .07 acres, so we might be able to squeeze in 2 more. I'm thinking fig and pear would be great as well as adding some currants and blackberries. Near our house is an irrigation ditch where we have a guerrilla orchard of 2 Bing and 2 Stella cherries. We'd like to expand that as well.

Lisa said...

Our tiny urban yard in Oakland California came with a mature lemon, a persimmon and a plum. I've been grafting different varieties onto the plum, and we've got baby fruit trees started -- a pluot, several figs, another lemon, a mandarin, a dwarf cherry for grafting, a pomegranate, and some berries. And I'm not done, yet!

Monique said...

I'm jealous of you all. I live in a 2nd floor condo and we're just doing container gardening right now. Hope to rent someplace with a yard at the end of this month. We'll see.