Rosalind
Deeply Rooted
Today I planted what hopefully will be the last set of apple trees to go into the orchard for a long, long time. Five apples, two sweet cherries, and two pawpaws, plus a grapevine in the corner that will be trained onto the fence. Then I put in three new Invicta gooseberries and put up rabbit fencing around them so DH won't "accidentally" mow them (well, not without hurting the mower). I put down straw in the muddy bits where the dogs like to turn into mud monsters. I even developed a new digging technique: Take one large, enthusiastic dog. Use a trowel to dibble a little hole in the spot where you plan to plant a large-ish tree. Put treat in hole and cover in a little dirt. Bring large dog to hole, and watch dog dig a GIANT hole, eat the treat, then dig an even bigger hole in case there were more treats laying around. Plant tree, fill in. It almost works, after the third try.
Finally, I took the burlap wrapping off the trees, as it's predicted to stay fairly non-freezing-ish for the next couple weeks. This may have been overoptimistic in retrospect, but done is done. And when I took the burlap wrapping off the mature, 6-year-old Spitzenberg, what did I see?
Two good branches full of fruiting spurs, just barely starting to turn color and puff a bit.
I have been waiting and WAITING for EVER for this tree to produce so much as a single blossom. I never had to pinch anything off, because it never produced any flowers as a young tree. I thought there was something horribly wrong with it, even though all the trees around it seemed fine, the leaves looked great, it was growing nicely spread branches and didn't even need any staking or fussing. But with any luck, this year I can eat Spitzenberg apples.
It's going to be pure torture until then, isn't it?
Finally, I took the burlap wrapping off the trees, as it's predicted to stay fairly non-freezing-ish for the next couple weeks. This may have been overoptimistic in retrospect, but done is done. And when I took the burlap wrapping off the mature, 6-year-old Spitzenberg, what did I see?
Two good branches full of fruiting spurs, just barely starting to turn color and puff a bit.
I have been waiting and WAITING for EVER for this tree to produce so much as a single blossom. I never had to pinch anything off, because it never produced any flowers as a young tree. I thought there was something horribly wrong with it, even though all the trees around it seemed fine, the leaves looked great, it was growing nicely spread branches and didn't even need any staking or fussing. But with any luck, this year I can eat Spitzenberg apples.
It's going to be pure torture until then, isn't it?
about the rocks...DH says, "build a rock garden!" Yeah, as long as he doesn't have to dig the holes. Would you believe I never owned a pry bar for rocks until I moved to Massachusetts, and when my handyman brought one over for installing a fence, I nearly widdled my pants thinking, "holy smokes, I've hired Vlad The Impaler!" When I was a kid, farmers would use the rocks dug out of the fields to build entire buildings with--you go to PA, you see a lot of fieldstone farmhouses and barns for that reason. Not sure why that kill-two-birds-w/200,000-stones idea never caught on in New England though, we'd have had the first skyscraper built out of granite fieldstone, for sure. 
