We’ve been working on Orchard 2, the second of our two existing orchards, the past couple of weekends.  The soil is right for digging and our gypsum amendment has had some time to work into the soil, so although we trampled our still-infant cover crop a bit, the time was right to put in this year’s new baby trees.

Here’s a picture of Orchard 2, its fledging cover crop, and the new trees.

We had a lot of fun with this planting, because we waited for the right time to dig, plus the weather was fantastic, and we are right on the cusp of that magical time when everything is emerald green.  Not there yet, but almost - I find myself holding my breath, waiting for it.

This is our second year of planting trees, and we learned from our efforts last year.  We put the trees into Orchard 2, which is slightly higher than Orchard 1 and on a slight slope.  Our hope is to avoid the problems we ran into with Orchard 1, where we ended up with fungus and cold weather damage, due to Orchard 1’s location in a spot of lowest relative elevation where the damp and cold settled.  Also, we amended with gypsum and cover crop to improve the soil’s texture - making digging easier but also hopefully helping the new trees get a better start.  Lastly, we used gopher baskets, taking advice we heard after planting our trees last year.

Gopher baskets are a bit costly, so I hope they are effective.  We definitely have a lot of gophers in the meadow between Orchard 1 and Orchard 2.

I thought it would be fun to include a series of tree planting pictures, a kind of “how to” to document our process.  I felt pretty clever with my use of the trenching shovel to define the sides of the holes, and the spade to do the actual earth moving.  These are much better dug holes than last year, that’s for sure!

Happy spring,

Dan