Did I say "total crop failure"?

There's always next year...our lone fruit dropped.

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...

Time to move those trees, Dad

Almost time to transplant...our full southern exposure has thawed the ground pretty well, might be able to till the winter rye cover in soon.

The layout is coming together, we'll probably go with a hex style, where each row is offset half a pitch from the other. Some clever arrangement is in order to avoid the rocks that were too big for a medium-sized excavator to move.

Eventually we'll pack in a dozen or so standards and half a dozen semi-dwarfs, with a bunch of temporary dwarf fillers inter-planted for the short term.

Here's our current list:

Standards - Black Oxford, Canadian Strawberry, Baldwin, Northern Spy, Roxbury Russet, Starkey, Winter Fameuse

Semi-dwarf: Westfield Seek-No-Further

Dwarf fillers: Belle de Boskoop, Sweet Sixteen, Ashmead's Kernel, Gravenstein, Hubbardston Nonesuch, Spy, Esopus Spitzenburg, Roxbury, Golden Russet

Standards are all on Antonovka, the Westfield is on M7 (not sure that'll be a keeper), the fillers are B9, G16 and a couple G30.

Getting very excited to have everything in the orchard proper instead of scattered about our "yard"...