Another thing to tick off our sustainability to-do list: we’ve started planting phase one of our orchard.
Today, we planted eight fruit trees: quince, damsons, plums and pears. These will be a great starting point for compotes, jams and preserves. We’re expecting a second delivery of fruit trees later in the week from our garden centre.
Admittedly, it looks extraordinarily unimpressive at the moment as the trees are just bare branches and twigs at the moment. They should, however, start sprouting leaves very soon and we’ll provide updates on the status of our orchard.
All the trees we’ve selected are ‘easy’ growers that self fertilize. I’m sure there’ll be a learning curve associated with growing fruit, but we’ll learn as we go along. All the trees were purchased as bare roots, so planting them was a tad easier as we didn’t need massive holes.
Phase two will consist of an assortment of apple trees. Depending on how our vegetable patch project goes (we’re on day three) we may still plant the apple trees in early May, but we’ll see how that goes because the veg patch has been a massive undertaking.
I was really keen on cherries too, but was advised by the garden centre that they’ll get picked off by the birds before we get a chance to enjoy them. The alternative is netting them (the cherries, not the birds) but that seems like a lot of effort on what will potentially be very tall trees. Maybe next year.