Still digging...

My little helper supervises transplanting the fillers - trees on mostly B9 rootstock we're setting in between our standards. Already I'm thinking about what a bummer it'll be to cut them...10 years from now.

It's easier to plant it once, when it's small...

Finally, we have all seven standards that were scattered about the yard transplanted to the orchard. All are on Antonovka rootstock. The biggest, a winter fameuse initially set three years ago, was actually relatively easy to relocate because the soil wasn't impervious to a shovel. The only problem was getting the resulting rootball out of the hole and 200 feet to the east...without something hefty to do the job, I made a snap decision to strip away the soil. We'll see how the tree recovers...

I might as well have blasted the remaining six out. They stayed in their temporary spots for two years and made varying degrees of progress in the extremely poor soil. There's so much rock, it's impossible to make any progress with a shovel; you have to pick away. It's essentially gravel with a little clay. Transplanting an intact rootball was practically out of the question, so I chose to bare-root the trees. It took a ton of careful digging in the gravel with bare hands and plenty of water to get them out. Hands were shredded, but much of the root structure was preserved. Again, we'll see how they fare...

Didn't you say we moved all the rocks?

Time to finally set out the orchard! Which should be straightforward ... except in our yard, where rocks grow over the winter. And grow exactly where a tree is supposed to go. After a little time with a shovel and bar, it became apparent that the old-fashioned approach would at least take all day, and maybe fail outright. Heavy equipment will save the day...eventually. So we'll be skipping the two rockupied spots for now. Even where big rocks aren't, plenty of little ones are, and digging is slow. Fortunately, the orchard space has far better "soil" than most of our land...