Spring

The enchanted orchard sees its first spring!

The Australian Finger Lime has unusual yet quite beautiful blossoms:



Petite native bees are constantly busy over it, tempted away from the tea trees (the only plants put in by the original owners that we left untouched).

One of the apple trees (the Daleys one, in case you wondered) flowered, but none of the others did, so my hopes of pollination are very slim:



And the weeping crab apple is just a font of joy. I can't wait til it gets bigger and even more gorgeous.

The cost of all these trees was fairly standard, I think. The Australian Finger Limes I've already added to the total. The other citrus (2 tahitian limes, 1 honey murcott mandarin) were $35 each. The maples and one of the blueberries, I already had. The weeping crab apple was $150 and the second blueberry bush was $12. Add another $150 worth of potting mix and clay breaker, plus a new shovel for $65 (the old one finally got too bent by me forcing it into clay), brings the grand running total to a scary $1291.

Planting

If you check the date of the last post, you'll see it was made five minutes ago, but in actual fact the logs were put in by the end of August, and the plants were put in shortly after that.

For each little tree, I dug out as much clay soil as my back could take and filled the gap with potting mix. There was one type for the citrus and another type for the maple trees.

I watered each one with seasol at day 1 and day 14.

The trees that I planted:

Tahitian Lime x 2
Honey Murcott Mandarin x 1
Tropical Apple (2 each of Dwarf Anna, Dwarf Dorsett Golden) x 4
Liquidambar x 1
Japanese maple x 1
The remaining Australian Finger Lime
Weeping Crab Apple x 1
Blueberry x 2

I'll be interested to see if there really is a difference in the healthiness of trees purchased from a nursery (for twice the price) and those purchased by mail order.

One of the Anna apple trees is from a nursery (where they told me mail order trees were dodgy) and one is from Daleys. Admittedly, the nursery-bought one has a straighter trunk, but they both seem quite vigorous.

Logs

As promised, I have used logs as a main future of the one-day-enchanted-orchard. They arrived on a truck.

First, the layout had to be marked out in lawn paint. At which point we discovered the house does not lie parallel to the kerb. More's the pity.

I planned a paved walkway with a well (or other feature) in the centre, running from the street to the front door. The gateposts were the two taller logs; the fences are to be living fences of tahitian lime (they will go where the two piles of clay soil are in the photo).




Action Man dedicated a whole day to digging holes. Hooray!





Yes, there's still LOTS of lawn, but it's still early days!