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Our 2022 spring planting started in January when we parceled out 10+ acres from our 47 acre field. We marked off a site for our barn by the road, and we selected a relatively flat section for the apple rows. In early April, we plowed and disced. Emily spent several hours driving the 10 acres with the disc, radio blaring. After a little refresher on geometry to achieve right angles without surveying, we layed out our rows with string.
Prepped Field
1,000,000 pink flags
Barn goes up!
This is just one load of trees. The ones pictured here are from Wafler Nursery of NY in crates of 500 each. While conceptually simple, the logistics for picking up trees in NY and getting them to our orchard was no small feat. We have gratitude for Doug Banker (Manager, Kuhns Christmas Trees) and Matt LeClair (814 Cider Works) in their creativity and assistance while we played group Tetris to unload the trees.
Here's Scott's Landscaping's nursery tree planter in action. We had a 5-person crew: Scott drove, Henry handed off trees to Emily, Emily placed the trees, Elliot/Doug guided the trees as the wheels pushed soil back in. Joel moved trees from the barn to the field with both our tractor and our truck. The planting was speedily progressing until the rain began on day 1. We finished the planting on day 2. All-in-all, we got 3,232 trees in the ground in 2 days.
There are a ton of deer at this location. So much so, that we had not one, but two neighbors stop by to introduce themselves and warn us about the risk for deer damage. We delayed installing the perimeter fence so that it could be installed at the same time as the trellis.
Basch Fencing installed both the exclusion fence and the trellis system for our tall spindle planting. Basch did an awesome job, and were extremely attentive even when our planting schedule changed last minute because of rain.
The bulk of the spring work, complete. All together, we planted 19 rows of trees of 5 varieties.
A little bit of proof that we did OK!
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