#rhombus orchard

[leebrontide]

Apparently if you have 5 or more fruit trees you officially have an orchard.

I haven't got a single piece of fruit from this yard yet but from now on I will be referring to my back yard as "the orchard". Going to go have some tea in the orchard. Need to go rake the orchard. You get the idea.

[leebrontide]

Well the peach tree I ordered FIVE WEEKS AGO arrived today. Three weeks after I started sending cancellation emails because they were taking so long the tree wasn’t going to arrive till after our planting season was over.

Yet here it is. Poor thing. I’m gonna plant it because that’s the best shot it’s got of survival. Give it lots of mulch.

We’ve already had snow though. It hasn’t stuck but it’s happened.

Good luck little Contender Peach.

In other mixed garden news, I pulled my shoulder cartilage trying to finish off moving the massive dirt pile into the raised bed, so today my step brother turned up to put in the last, like, 30 minutes of dirt hauling needed to get that done.

He’ll be back in a few days, to, to finish moving the excess dirt out of the ally because there is still…so much dirt.

But yay! Raised bed ready for next springs roses and raspberries!

[leebrontide]

Guess who just impulse bought a small peach tree on the internet

This brings the perennial fruit count up to:

2 apple trees

1 plum tree

4 dwarf cherry trees

1 semidwarf cherry tree

5 redcurrrant bushes

2 lowbush wild blueberry bushes

5 highbush blueberries

4 grape vines

1 lingonberry, that I got on sale, if it makes it.

and 1 peach tree

Not bad for a city lot.

Still no raspberries till I get some raised beds put in.

[leebrontide]

I think we've found the last fruit tree we're planting in this initial round of garden planning.

It's an apple- yes, a 3rd apple tree, called Prairie Spy.

It was developed by the University of Minnesota in 1914, so it's been around for ages. But it's still a very obscure variety because it's not actually great for commercial growing. It takes longer to fruit compared to many other varieties, the fruit is really inconsistently sized, etc. It was an early effort to get more hyper-cold-hardy apples this far north. We take that for granted now and MN grows a ton of apples of many many types. But that was more radical an idea 100 years ago.

I would love to know why it's named Prairie Spy. The best explanation I've seen is that it's because it's thought to have Northern Spy as one of it's parents.

The reason we're picking this one is simple- I had a bunch from the Farmer's Market and they are very simply the best tasting apples I've ever had. It's got a lot of sugar and a lot of tang and an amazing complexity of flavor. The apples themselves were small but that just meant we were all eating them almost like candy. I'm desperate to make cider out of them.

As a bonus, it finishes ripening very late, which helps us prevent getting all out apples at once and having to sort of...cope with 3 trees worth of apple harvest all in one go.

Also- just look at it. That's got to be one of the most photogenic, platonic-ideal apple trees ever.