Waiting for the first fruits from grafted trees
Mark and I only tasted our first homegrown apples
last year, and those trees were already two or three years old when we
put them in the ground four years ago. By that math, the little
trees I grafted this spring won't fruit until 2020 or 2021. It's hard to imagine waiting five to
eight years to taste the fruits from the trees we just grafted.
On the other hand, you
can also look at those non-fruiting years as an opportunity to really
get the orchard in stellar order so the eventual fruits are so
chock-full of micronutrients they knock your socks off. To that end, I'll be growing cover crops in the tree alleys
where this year's babies will be set out next year, and then I'll
probably grow vegetables or raspberries in between the baby trees in
later years until the trees begin to fill in their space. The bed I
pulled blackberries out of last fall is proof that simply topdressing
soil with manure and mulch every year will result in supremely dark and
loose earth in no time, and I'm sure my apple trees would love some soil like that to grow into.
That
mental perambulation reminded me that I have some spare room in between
the new grape vines I installed this past fall. I mulched the
grape rows well to begin the battle against weeds, but the transplants
won't have spread their roots far yet. Why not sneak in an extra
two dozen cabbage transplants into that ground? In an effort to
hedge my bets against weird weather, I started about 200 more cabbage
seedlings under the quick hoops than I actually need, and they all came
up, thrived, and need homes. I know I have a plant-propagation
problem...but I can quit any time....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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