Orchard Update

Well, starting a small farm is nothing if it's not time consuming and crazy making! Well, Texas A&M had a plant sale and we decided to double the size of our orchard. Our orchard will eventually have about 30 trees in it. Orchards are long term projects because they do not produce for 2-7 years and like our Apple tree, there are no guarantees. We however, feel that it's an investment in our personal grocery budget as well as in future farm income. We plan to look into organic fruit tree management and our friend Stephanie will be coming along side of us (with her expertise) to help us with our orchard and garden. Anyway, we currently have: Cherry, Apple (that may be dead), Plum, Peach, fig & Satsuma orange. The fig, Peach & Apple are not in the orchard as we planted the later two without much consideration to the creation of a formal orchard when we first moved onto the land. We have now purchased:

• 2 Blackberry Kiowa
• Pear: Ayers 1
• Plum: Bruce Semi dwarf
• Plum Methley
• Molly Delicious Apple
• Fuji Apple

We will be unable to plant these tree until we make a formal grid of the property and figure out the spacing. Wayne will be doing this Thursday & Friday night. This will be useful in all of farm endeavours and we should have already completed such a plan. Yes, once these start to set abundant fruit we will add these lovelies to our offerings here at Rooster Hill.

RH

The Orchard

We are in the process of slowly building an orchard. Last year we purchased a Feleciano peach, plum & apple tree. At mid year we purchased a fig we found for $4.48 and a Satsuma orange a few months after that. This week we bought a Montgomery cherry & Bartlett Pear. Sadly we found out that the apple tree is dead and we will have to buy another tree this year.

We buy our trees from Producers Co-op and we try to get 2-3 trees a year. Producer's only buys trees that grow in this area which makes our selection process much easier. The trees at producers co-op are 2-3 years old so most will start producing in 2-4 years.

This time we learned that if you pluck the fruit from a young tree it will grow stronger and faster more quickly. That while it is fruiting it is not growing all the energy is going toward making fruit. Our goal is to have enough trees to sell our fruit at farmers market or in a buyers co-operative. This is a long term goal as it we will not be able to do so for a couple of years. However, once the trees start to produce we will be over run with fruit.