Preparing for the plum
In my natural habitat, I am a frugivore, so I
have slowly been building an orchard around our trailer. My trees
have faced varying success --- to be totally truthful, I haven't done a
very good job with them in the past.
It all started three years ago when we planted an orchard before moving
to the land. Apples, pears, peaches, and plums were pretty much
totally eaten up by deer that summer. Since moving in, we've
continued to battle deer, which nibble on our apples and pears whenever
I turn my back. We've had better luck with peaches and
nectarines, though, which may just be because the deer don't like
them. Or it may be because I read somewhere that peaches need
drainage and decided to plant them in raised beds to battle
our clay soil.
This winter, we're only putting in one fruit tree, a plum which Daddy
ordered extremely cheaply from his extension office. The poor
tree got caught up in the holiday mails, and even though Daddy sent it
priority mail it arrived a week later with dry roots and a bent
top. I soaked it overnight, then heeled it in while I prepared
its new home. The plum will be replacing a wild plum by the barn
which finally bore this past spring in time for me to discover that the
large stone and skimpy, untasty flesh made for a fruit even I won't eat.
The ground beneath the wild plum is the most recently reclaimed portion
of the yard. Baby plum trees and wild blackberries formed a
thicket threaded through by Japanese honeysuckle --- a mass even the
chicken tractors wouldn't quite knock down. I skipped the area
each time I mowed, but Mark bushhogged it with the lawn mower one day
last summer, knocking down all of the tall growth.
So yesterday I lined the bottom of my plum's new raised bed with deep
layers of newspaper to prevent the honeysuckle from twining back up
around our new tree, then scoured the yard for logs to form the sides
of the bed. After filling the bed with half frozen compost, I
called it a day --- Mark was visiting a friend and there's no way I'm
cutting down the old plum by myself. Stay tuned for part two, the
planting of the plum.
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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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