Garden notes

Whew.

Today I planted five bare root fruit trees. Fuji and Gala apples, an O'Henry peach, a Lapins cherry, and a 20th Century Asian pear.

Five trees is definitely my limit! As I continue to work on this backyard, I hope to get stronger, but right now, planting five trees is about as much as I can do. I'd already pretty much dug the holes; I enlarged them a bit today, and made sure the gopher runs that I'd bisected were plugged up. Then I went out to get some chicken wire, some potting soil for humus, and the trees.

I lined the sides of the holes with chicken wire, to keep the gophers from munching all the roots off over night, and mixed the potting soil with the soil I'd dug out. Then I planted the trees and watered them in. All in all, I'm pretty proud of myself! Our garden is now officially begun.

After resting up a bit and snacking on a Fuji apple (I'll be picking them from our own tree one day!) I decided that I really should keep track of what I've planted. So I went outside and made a note of each tree. Then, of course, I decided that I wanted a more permanent record. Instead of taking the trouble to measure out our yard and draw the plot, I copied a satellite photo of our house and sketched in my new trees.

I'm going to keep adding dots as I plant; this way I'll have a good record of my progress.