The Timber Orchard

It’s winter of 2018, and the seed catalogs are starting to arrive.  We expanded the garden in May of 2018 with the help of my awesome family, so we have room for a few more fruit trees.  

We had wanted some apple trees that were specifically for cider making, so we decided on a Wickson Crabapple and a Redfield apple, a variety that has a red interior.  These trees should be hardy in our zone and cross pollinate with our existing apples.  They are both on Budagovsky 9 rootstock, which is a dwarf rootstock that is early-bearing and VERY cold hardy.

Toby’s favorite fruit is the apricot, so we have been wanting to fit in trees somewhere.  When we expanded the garden he built a giant wall of wood next to the greenhouse.  It’s nearly 16 feet long and 10 feet high.  We amended the soil in front of the wall, and we are planning to espalier three apricots: Westcot, Scout, and Sugar Pearl.  They should get some extra heat from the thick wooden wall and the greenhouse.  The Sugar Pearl is on Myrobalan root stock, which tolerates wet soils and will become a large tree, and the others are seedling.  Hopefully this vigor will give us lots of branches to work with as we try espaliering for the first time!  

Somehow we have skipped traditional pears, even though there are some in the valley and they are one of the easiest fruits to grow.  We settled on a Flemish Pear because it is cold hardy, self-fertile, and supposedly delicious!  It is on a OHxF 87 rootstock, which means it will be semi-dwarf, a vigorous grower, and a good producer.  

The last addition will be a Veteran Peach.  Peaches are self-fertile, and we had so much success with our Contender peach that we wanted one more.  This one is a true seedling, not on rootstock, so it may be extremely vigorous.  We’ll be pruning that tree forever, and it will probably take a while to reach maturity, but it will also have a longer lifespan.

That will be seven more fruit trees to plant in spring of 2019!  That brings the total to 25 fruit trees.  And they must all be watered.  We’ll see how they do!