An Apple!

Our Belle de Boskoop on B9 actually set some fruit! (how it got pollinated is somewhat of a mystery.) we snipped all but one fruitlet...so we're just one apple away from complete crop failure :^)

Planted

Everything got moved...that could be moved. Two big spoiler rocks, each sitting directly where a standard should go, forced a change in plan. They're not that big, and a compact backhoe should've been able to move them. If only the machine we rented was actually as-advertised, and not a toy. So the rocks remain, and we had to move stuff around.

A month later and everything appears to have survived. Some of the dwarf trees actually look pretty good.

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...

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"...

orchard plus snow, minus trees

looking out the window at the orchard space, with the temporarily planted standards on the right. they've been there for a couple seasons, we hoped to have them moved by now, drat. everything's fenced in to keep out the droves of deer that will arrive soon...