We moved into our house in northwestern Pennsylvania in 2015. Our little midcentury modern ranch was built in 1961 on almost 3/4 of an acre of pristine lawn. I should interject here and tell you that I hate mowing and I bought what my city kid self would think of as half a golf course. The solution? Own less grass. I grew up on a city lot for the first half of my childhood and in the suburbs for the second half. We always had a garden and I planned to have one here. I ordered twelve 4-foot by 4-foot raised beds and eagerly awaited the seed catalogues that would arrive in the next month or two.
During our very cold first winter we ordered a handful of fruit trees: Mountain Rose, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, Northern Spy, and Queen Cox apples, a George IV peach, Blenheim apricot, Smyrna Quince, and a couple of mulberry trees. Spring arrived and we dutifully dug holes, planted our saplings, wrapped trunks, and watered. We congratulated ourselves and looked forward to the time when we’d be able to reap bushels of fruit. We also planted elderberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries.
Jump to spring 2017: I did not account for the deer. Or the voles. Or the extraordinary amount of clay in our soil. Or the multitude of wildlife that will gleefully chow down on our juicy baby trees all winter long. I had simply planted an all you can eat buffet. While the deer nibbled the new growth, the voles ate the roots and bark. We lost all but the Mountain Rose apple, the quince, and the peach tree. One elderberry, three blackberry bushes, all of the blueberries survived as well. Since we have a prolific number of “wild” apple trees about (and the university nearby has 8 trees planted for the public’s consumption) I planted one Yellow Transparent apple tree on the recommendation of one of my patients who stated it was his absolute favorite apple. “Like ambrosia!” he exclaimed. Of course I had to have it. We also planted a Stanley plum, another mulberry, a pawpaw, and three chestnut trees (one each Chinese, Italian, and an American-Chinese hybrid). We learned our lesson and caged them all to keep the deer away and switched to rubber tree mulch rings to deter the voles. So far so good.
Fast forward to 2022. I pruned our trees hard last winter so skipped doing so this year. We’re hoping this next year to finally get some fruit. Our soil has a lot of clay in it which makes growing somewhat slow, but regular applications of compost and earthworm castings have really been helping to amend the soil. Oh, and we found out that the pawpaw didn’t survive this past winter so we dug it out and replaced it with a hardware store peach tree.
We are very fortunate to have so many farms in the area and frequently scoop up bushels of peaches, plums, apples, cherries, berries, and veggies we don’t grow (or don’t grow in enough quantity).
Other orchard updates: The George IV peach did a strange thing and looked quite dead for a while but now appears to have recovered somewhat, let’s hope that continues this coming spring. The Yellow Transparent apple tree shot up another four feet in height, and the deer have discovered the hardware store peach tree this week and it might be completely defoliated right now. Everybody loves an underdog!
All of this is a learning process! I completely underestimated the difficulty in starting a home orchard. If we ever live anywhere else, I’m definitely testing the soil content before we buy.
bigmuddyorchard.com 