Planting fruit trees
This summer brings about the task of planting some fruit trees in front of the house. Something I’ve been wanting to do since moving here. Last year we planted two apple trees. So this year we set about purchasing nursery trees from Pleasant Valley Nursery in Antigonish.
We chose two pear trees, a D’Anjou and a Harrow Crisp. Pear trees need two different types in order to pollinate. Also, we chose self pollinating trees; a Tehranivee cherry, a Stanley plum and a Venture peach tree.
Here’s a before picture of the proposed planting area taken from the deck above.
Then it was time to start peeling back the sod.
The skid steer makes easier work of peeling back the sod. It does make a mess of the lawn with some compression of the soil and tearing of the sod, but the grass will grow back.
Certainly I didn’t want to waste the sod, so I made use of it by installing it on the embankment behind the workshop.
It took a couple hours yesterday to do that prep work. Today I set about planting the trees. With the cool and foggy Maritime weather, it was perfect for this type of work outdoors.
10 years ago when we built the house we had to fill in this area with many truck loads of fill. Then cover with topsoil and apply hydro seed. The grass certainly grew, the fill underneath has no nutritional value whatsoever. We had contracted out this work, and its only now I am discovering that they used unclean fill. I am find a lot of chunks of asphalt. Not happy about that.
Anyway, I was able to amend the soil with some forest topsoil I screened last month, and added to it some compost and peat moss I had on hand already.
It took about 3 hours today to mix the amended soil together and plant each tree. All that is left to do now is to clean up the area and put down some wood mulch.
One Comment
Pingback: