Thursday, April 24, 2008

Urban Orchard Part 2

This is one of the 3 apple trees we bought. As per the catalog it's a self pollinating hand grafted semi dwarf, 4 on 1 antique variety. Which means that it can be grown to a height of 6' & has 4 different antique varieties of apples. I was riding the fence on this type of tree until the Nurseryman @ Miller's mentioned that it comes in an antique vs. modern tree.
Golden Russet -med./lg. yellow with russetting, crisp, keeps until April, good cider apple.
Snow or if you wanna impress your MIL Fameuse -med. red great eating, cooking, cider.
Summer Rambo -16th century French, lg. yellow, famous for eating & sauce, vigorous.
Roxbury Russet -16th century Massachusetts, lg. green, great for juice & cider, keeps until April.

4' away in the same bed is planted our 2nd Apple tree a Sops of Wine which date back to medieval England. Everything we have read on this variety says it's a great cooking & cider apple.

All the trees have buds with one or two that have tiny leaves. Unfortunately our recent heat wave of 75 + degree weather is coming to a close tomorrow. Will discuss with DH about throwing plastic over our orchard in the evening to prevent frost damage. Good that there all dwarfs, lol.

~~ pelenaka ~~
Now if I could just get over the fact that if I had planted fruit trees when I first moved in 8 years ago ...





Urban Orchard Part 1

Part 1
A few Sundays ago DH & I sent our daughter's to the movies via a Christmas Gift Card so we could go fruit tree shopping a few hours away in Canandaigua, New York. That in itself was a bit of an expirence becomming lost and slightly distracted with the numerius antique shops in the region. The only thing that stopped us was the fact that if we need the cargo room & $ for plants. So all total we spent about $150 for 3 apple trees, 1 cherry tree, and 2 grape vines and some sorta oil that DH said we needed for an insectiside. Gas was about $10. Bonding time priceless.
The Nurseryman who helped us was extremely knowledgeable & patient with us or rather me. Seems that aprently once in the warehouse I forgot I only farm >1/14 of an acre. I wanted everything. So once DH gave me a reality smack & we explained to him what we wanted to eventually accomplish he was very helpful in a very non salesman way. He even was able to give me his opinion on what different types of fruit tasted like which helped me decide (canning possibilities).
Oh he verified that more than 2 fruit trees is an orchard. We have an orchard!
www.millernurseries.com

~~ pelenaka ~~