Now that all the paperwork has finally been finished, I’d like to introduce you to our new orchard!

Our name for it perhaps is a bit dramatic since it’s only around 1000 sq. meters or a quarter of an acre. But it’s only 10 minutes walk from our front door and has 19 apple, cherry and peach trees growing on it, most of which are young trees. When we started looking at the property about 2 years ago, we hoped we could keep chickens or even a goat there. But the zoning laws state that no permanent structures can be built on the land so that put a damper on our interest for a while. We thought the property may finally have been sold to someone else but gave the owners a call anyway and found the price had been lowered significantly. And since land like this rarely becomes available around here, we decided to go for it. No, we don’t really NEED the extra work but we think it will be a great place to go camping and there is river access for the dog to swim in or us to fish. We could even launch a canoe. Obviously we’re already really looking forward to spending more time here.

This is the view from the front path. There’s not too many people who walk or by here we found out this Sunday so it’s really quite secluded once you’re inside. The previous owners have done a fairly good job planting tall hedges around along the front sides.

Here’s a view from fairly fair back. As you can see, most of the younger fruit trees are at the back…and all very nicely lined up.

We’re going to have a great harvest of apples and cherries this year. Unfortunately a few of the trees are looking a bit sick so we’re watching them carefully. It could just be a matter of the grass being too high around the trees and they weren’t getting enough water. We’ll see if they seem any happier after all the rain we’ve gotten in the last couple days.

There are also other decorative trees on the property like this one. We have 5 of these trees, actually. And no, it’s not dead. The leaves on the outside are a purple-red color but newer growth comes out green underneath. To me, the tree looks like it’s built upside down or something. They’re spindly on top but full on the bottom. I can only hope that a little pruning will help them look decent – otherwise all those suckers are coming out and being replaced with something that will produce edibles.

We’re planning to keep all the trees for at least a year so we can see how everything does. Some trees around here (like the peaches in our garden) only produce fruit every 2 years so we don’t want to cut down our best trees just because we don’t realize they’re not supposed to be producing anything. We do have a couple older apple trees that may need to come down though since they have no new growth at all.

We’ll be trying our hand at grafting apple trees in the coming year and will be investing plenty of time in mowing the grass. We’re already thinking about what crops we might put in the ground in the future to cut down on some of the mowing time (wheat, rye, large squash and pumpkins, wild strawberries).

One thing is certain – we’re going to have a whole lot of fruit to process into juice, jams and other food. And if we feel overwhelmed with apples, we’ll just make them into apple wine. Anyone want to place advance orders? 🙂