Sweet Days Ahead - New Fruit Orchard and Berry Patch

What could be sweeter than enjoying fresh fruit and berries from your own land? Regrettably, all we had on the property when we started was one little black currant bush that produced about 10 berries.

Since berries and fruit trees take a while until they produce, we were anxious to plant some as soon as we could. In the fall of 2021 I started looking through nursery catalogues to make a plan for planting in the spring of 2022. There were a lot of decisions to make:

• What type of fruits and berries did we want?

• What strains of fruit trees were naturally more disease resistant?

• Which trees needed a “mate” for cross pollination, and what was a suitable mate?

• Finding varieties that would ripen at different times to spread out the harvest (assuming they did actually grow).

• What size of trees – standard, dwarf, semi-dwarf?

• Where would we plant them? How much space did each tree need?
  

And even after taking the above concerns into account, we still didn’t know what would grow well on our soil. We didn’t want to sink a lot of money into any one type of fruit only to find it wouldn’t grow here. We decided to try out a small number of many things.

Thinking I would be well ahead of everyone, I started placing orders in December and January. To my surprise many items were already listed as “out of stock”. I ended up going to 4 different growers... as far west as Elora, and as far East as Ottawa… to get what we wanted.

• 3 pear trees

• 3 plum trees

• 2 sour cherry trees

• 2 sweet cherry trees

• 14 assorted apple trees

• 20 raspberry bushes

• 4 blueberry bushes

• 10 rhubarb roots

All these were bareroot plants - dug up in the fall after going dormant and then kept in cold storage over the winter awaiting spring planting.

Once the ground was thawed in April, I started to lay out the area for our bushes and trees. The berry fields were to be in the flat area north of the house, while the sloped hill just to the east was to be the location for the fruit trees. I staked out 4 rows for the trees, and prepared the soil for the trees and bushes to come. At the end of April I picked up the plants and then over the next 2 days quickly got everything into the ground before the roots dried out. And then I watered, and waited, and watered and waited ....

Eventually, all but one tree leafed out. They seemed to be growing, producing more leaves weekly. But then the leaves started to diminish. Was it bugs? I tried home spray solutions that I found on-line, and organic sprays. Things seemed to improve for a while, but then suddenly some trees lost all their leaves overnight. It seemed that deer had decided our young trees were a tasty snack. There was a whole orchard just down the road, but for some reason they liked our trees. To try to deter them I put up a sensor light – no success. Then I sprayed the trees with a deer repellent – some success until it rained. Eventually, I ended up putting a cage around each tree. This seemed to work and most of the trees sent out new leaves. Of course there were more bugs to come too. But as 2022 ended, we had managed to keep most of the trees alive. We anxiously await spring to see how many survived the winter. I’ve ordered half a dozen more trees though just in case.

For 2023, I’ll add to the raspberry and blueberry plants, as well as start our strawberry patch. It will be another year of planting, watering, watching and waiting to see what happens. Fingers crossed!

The above map shows how the Fruit Orchard in red and the Berry Patch in pink have begun to come online by the end of summer, 2022.

These pics show the development of the fruit tree orchard from Spring 2022 through to Fall and Winter 2022.