Take 2. The first try was two years ago (see here). We’ve learned a lot since and made some modifications, namely, raised beds.

During the two years, we’ve also learned about Kevin Hauser and his knack for growing apples in hot climates. As a result we’ve been exposed to some non-traditional apples for our area; varieties once thought limited to much colder climates.

Now that they’ve been planted, they really just look like short sticks in the ground. However, we’re hoping that one day, these espaliered trees will be providing us with some excellent apples. We highly recommend Kevin’s trees and how-to manuals, especially for those in hotter areas!

There goes Ben again, he ends up pulling some of our plants to put in more fruit trees, and I think it’s pretty funny. Always looking for backyard real estate to “shoehorn” in more fruit trees! The latest victim? My overgrown lavender bushes and my broom plant (the lavender is being relocated around the wooden beds.)

As a result of the poorly draining soil in our backyard, we’ve had to raise the roots on the fruit trees, off of the ground to allow them to properly oxygenate. Some of the beds we had custom-made from Corten steel; these recent ones he made from old redwood scraps he had combined with new redwood boards (he said the cost of redwood has more then doubled since the last time he purchased it a few years back!).

It’s bare root fruit tree season, so now is the best time of the year re: price and variety for a lot of these deciduous fruit trees. The vast majority originated from Dave Wilson Nursery. The apples he just purchased at his most recent CRFG (California Rare Fruit Growers) meeting, from Kuffel Creek (they specialize in apples for hot climates). Here’s a listing of all the deciduous fruit trees we have in beds now (the rest of the fruit trees consist of some citrus, blueberries, a passion fruit, guava, a kiwi, and a wax apple tree.):

Cherry Minnie Royal
Royal Lee

Nectarine Arctic Star
Nectarine Atomic Red
Nectarine Double Delight
Nectarine Snow Queen

Nectaplum Spice Zee
Aprium Cot-N-Candy

Peach Eva’s Pride
Peach Donut

Pluot Dapple Supreme
Pluot Splash
Pluot Emerald Drop
Plum Burgundy
Peach Kaweah
Pluot Flavor King
Pluot Flavor Grenade

Asian Pear Shinseiki
Asian Pear Hosui
Asian Pear 20th Century
Chinese Pear Ya Li
Chinese Pear Tsu Li

Fig Black Mission
Fig Kadota
Fig Peter’s Honey
Fig Tiger Panache
Fig Ronde de Bordeaux

Pomegranate Parfianka
Pomegranate Angel Red

Apple Williams Pride
Apple Sierra Beauty
Apple King David
Apple Fuiji
Apple Dixie Red Delight
Apple Lady Wiliams

Persimmon Fuyu

Che (Chinese Mulberry)

They’re ALL pretty much “babies” now, so, the journey has just begun! Read more backyard orchard culture posts here.

Part 3 was almost exactly a year ago and it took a year to figure out that we needed to sort of start again. Actually, we pretty much knew by the winter, but we didn’t get to put the plan in place of how to adjust for our backyard orchard until this spring. We uprooted the handful of trees that survived, put them in 15 gal pots in the meantime, awaiting their move to their final destination (hopefully). We learned our soil wasn’t draining like it’s supposed to, so too much water was collecting at the base of the roots and essentially, suffocating them to death. After having a specialist come out, help diagnose the problem and offer solutions, we decided it would be best to lift the roots of the trees up higher and put them in raised beds. Can you tell we’re quite serious about our gardening?

In the photo above, the trees will go against the wall at back left and in the beds at far right with the trellis system on the right with the wood posts (where we will train pears and apples into espaliers). Immediately in front and left of these beds was where the trees once were; in their place, we now have three, 3 x 13 ft cor-ten steel raised beds and this is where all the seasonal vegetables will be planted (in the photo above, you can see where Ben has already started another trellis system for our tomatoes).

Every year we get better at gardening and learn from our mistakes (make more and learn from those too!). Some have been costly mistakes and some we’re glad we made, because things have turned out better. We research as much as we can, Ben especially, and talk to as many experts we can, but these things still happen. I’m excited about how everything is situated now and things already look so much better from just a couple months ago. It feels good to finally be moving forward with our garden. There were a few months where we just weren’t quite sure how to troubleshoot problems, but things are looking much better now, and hopefully everything keeps flourishing.

I wrote a post about our cor-ten steel beds here and I will have an updated post about how that side is coming along. Cor-ten steel beds are a bit of an investment, but putting money into our garden and house is important to us, and we hope one day to be able to have fruits and vegetables coming out the wazoo in our own backyard. We’ve done pretty good with vegetables in the past, so we can only get better, right?!

So I’m a little behind in continuing the sharing of our backyard orchard, but don’t worry, you’ll get them. Here, we actually get to planting our trees (well, this is back in December). After we heeled the trees in while we were spacing things out on the dirt, it was finally time to plant the trees. Ben marked the center of the hole with a short rebar segment, then with a string, he made his own protractor of sorts and created a 36″ diameter circle (by the way, he said, not needed, he’s just anal!). He used this as a guide to dig out his hole. Mind you, there were going to be multiple trees planted in one hole.

He dug out the hole to the depth of each of the individual the root systems and all the way around the circle he created. He grouped fruits together that would be most compatible with one another and that would also allow for successive ripening. I know, it’s a whole new language. Honestly, I don’t even understand it all. He tells me and I just nod and say, “Uh huh, uh huh, yeah.” (He spends a lot of time researching this; says he gets MOST of his guidance from the fine folks at Dave Wilson Nursery, their site and their “how-to videos“).

Then, he covered up the bare roots with more dirt and then chopped off the tree up to the height of his knee. It’s feels like a daring thing to do and the trees end up looking just like sticks in the ground, but that’s what you’re supposed to do, so that’s what we did.

We have 4 groupings of fruit trees, which means 4 holes, planted this way: fig trees with 4 varieties, nectarine trees with 4 varieties, cherry trees with 2 varieties, and pluot/peach with 4 varieties. Now, it’s about six months later from when these were done and they look a little bit more than just sticks in the ground now (sticks with some baby branches)… we even starting to see figs growing! We’re totally not pros and while Ben does most of the research that goes into planning this, we both love working in our backyard together!

Go back and see part 2 here…

We, more like Ben, mostly planted bare root trees for our backyard orchard. Not only that, he chose mini or dwarf sized, so that we would be able to plant multiple trees in one hole following the Dave Wilson style of backyard orchard cultures. The ones pictured here aren’t even all the trees Ben has planted. This was done back in January (I’m slow in blogging this), some of them even have leaves growing now and are starting to look like more than just sticks in the ground.

Since we didn’t plant the trees in the ground right away, Ben decided to heel-in the trees. This is done to help the trees maintain dormancy for a longer period of time and to protect it from ground frost. We left it like this for several days until he had more time to actually dig the holes for the trees.

It’s pretty crazy how much goes into planning this out. Ben has spent countless hours reading and researching about the best way to do this. We laugh about this, but most things he reads recommend starting small. I don’t think Ben really heeded that advice and it seems his motto is “Go big or go home.” I definitely think having about 30 trees is go big. We’re totally learning every season about how to do something better and what we did wrong. Even with all the research he’s done, there’s always a way to improve. Next post, I will list out everything we’re planting, but since Ben’s the one in the know of all of that, he’ll probably have to write the next post. I’d bug him about it now, but he’s downstairs working on a surprise. I like surprises, so I don’t want to disturb him.

Have any of you heeled-in bare root trees before? This is totally something new to me, so I was totally intrigued when Ben was doing it. Read part 1 of how our backyard orchard culture started.

Well, we’re stepping into new territory and learning (Ben’s learning) all about how to cultivate a backyard orchard culture. Say what?!! Basically, it’s all about how to grow an orchard in a small space…

We live in your regular suburban neighborhood, in a tract home that we love (and are slowly infusing our own personality into), so while we have a decent size yard for being in Southern California, it’s still not that big. One side of it is already dedicated to our vegetable gardening (this side gets the most sun), but we wanted to venture out and start growing our own fruit trees too. Ben’s the lead on this project and honestly, I just have him tell me what it’s going to cost and what trees are going in, all the other stuff, it’s on him.

He’s been spending hours (and I probably should say days!) of research into this project and even with all his research, we have hit a few snags that has cost us more time (and money) to figure things out. He’s spoken to master gardeners, professionals, emailed people with questions, there’s just so much to learn and know that Ben really tries hard to do all he can to make sure he’s doing things correctly. First things first though, and we had to get all the grass ripped off from the side that was going to hold our mini orchard. Next, we had to go in and remove some dirt so that Ben could amend the soil. Here’s where the first snag came in, after we all have spent a day or so removing dirt, he did a drain test on the dirt and turns out we have really bad drainage even with the amended soil. After going back and forth for a solution that was going to be the most time efficient and cost effective, we decided to dig 2 feet deep and get all that dirt removed. OYE! Of course, that giant hole was going to be filled up with good dirt with better drainage and that’s what happened.

We found a company that came with a little bobcat to dig deep (can you imagine if we had to do that all ourselves?!) and then they hauled all that dirt out (we tried doing it ourselves first, but I’m glad we didn’t finish the job alone). While we were at it, we decided to rip up the rest of the grass in that area since we were doing such a major overhaul. We figured, might as well go all the way at this point and just take out all the grass since we had wanted to do that eventually. We had to buy giant trucks full of soil, which got dumped in our driveway, and Ben (and John, BFF’s husband) with another guy we hired to help, moved all that dirt to the back and filled up the hole. This beginning has been such an ordeal and has taken so much out of us already, but we know that the investment will definitely be worth it.

Now, we have good dirt in and so comes the tree planting. Last I thought, 23 trees were going in. Yes, I said 23!!! Ben informed me today that the number has been upped a little bit. Oh my world! Now, here’s the thing with a backyard orchard culture… you don’t let trees grow more than 5-7 feet tall and some holes have multiple trees in it. Sounds crazy, I know. This is just the beginning of our journey, so you can be sure there will be many posts to come and I will share more info soon. If you want to start reading about it, Dave Wilson has a plethora of information to get you started.

Do you grow any fruit trees in your yard? Any tips for us beginners?