After wishing for a house with a turret, another of thing on MT’s wish list was to have an orchard on our land. His wish is of course my command.  Well not always but in this instance I was happy to oblige!

Regular bloggers will know I’ve been planting trees but none of them fruit trees.  That’s because they weren’t available for delivery until Jul/August.  It struck me whilst I was away in Mahia that the fruit trees weren’t delivered.  Why might that be I fretted. 

It must have been fate as when I returned home there was an message on my home phone from the post office from 4 days previously telling me that I had some trees delivered and they still hadn’t been collected.  Aggh, my bare root fruit trees had been delivered to my PO Box rather than delivered to home.  Aggh, they’d been there for 4 days what sort of state were they in.  Aggggggh, what will MT say when I tell him that I’ve killed off his orchard before it was even planted.

Not knowing whether the Post Shop would still be opened I sped off to town to see if I could rescue my trees.  I can tell you after 6 hours of driving home this was the last thing I wanted but needs must to grant the wish of an orchard to my beloved.  Amazingly I was able to collect the trees and give them a quick drink to make sure their roots were still damp.  Luckily the lovely people at the Edible Garden had prepared the trees well for their journey to us.

I have to admit that I did wait till Sunday to plant out the trees.  The first challenge of course with this sort of thing is to content with two inquisitive bassets who just love it when I dig holes.  They hot footed it down the garden to “help” me unpack the trees.

They were also more interested in chasing each other around the trees when they were planted.  Here’s a rare shot of Mason on the run!

So what have we planted in our orchard you might be wondering.  We’ve got seven trees so far and one more I’ve got to source.  We’ve got:

  • three types of apples – liberty, tydemans late orange, peasgood nonsuch
  • cherry – lapins
  • crab apple – malus Jelly King
  • two types of plum – burbank and reine claude du bavay
  • pear -seckle/william bon chretien.

As if by magic the plum (reine claude du bavay) is already flowering!  Thank goodness there is still signs of life after they rather untimely delay in the Post Office.

I feel sure that we’ll be adding more ornamental fruit trees in our kitchen garden when we start building that next year.  For the moment I’m delighted that I can now say all of our trees are planted.  We just need to wait for them to grow and provide us with luscious fruit.

If you could plant, or have already planted, an orchard  what would be your choice of trees?