Paper Bag Trees
05 Jun 2011 5 Comments
Fruit trees were some of the first things we planted when we bought our place in 2005. Fruit trees and some grape vines and an asparagus bed. Things that take some time to establish. The grapevines are long gone, they were a sad experiment. We considered nut trees until we discovered they take like 20 years to fruit. Heck, I’m retired and don’t want to wait that long. Besides, the squirrels would probably steal them before we could get to them. We planted apples, peaches, cherries, apricots and persimmons. We got our first fruit last year, exactly two apples. One fell off the tree and a deer got the other one. I made a pomander out of the ground apple (waste not want not). This year appears to be our year for fruit because it’s popping out everywhere. It’s either that the trees are finally mature enough or perhaps that fertilizer I bought off of a commercial orchard last year is helping (imagine that!). I figure I can’t help it if it falls on the ground again this year but I refuse to share with the local deer population. We didn’t want to fence the orchard so I did some research. Apparently, if you cover the fruit the deer can’t find it. As long as the leaves have sunlight, it’s OK for the fruit to be shaded. So… now we have paper bag trees. It looks pretty funny and may not work but fingers crossed that it does. I want fruit this year, dammit! Luckily our newly purchased annex (the trailer next door) has giant apple, peach and plum trees and we have a ladder.
Missing Willow Farm 
Jun 05, 2011 @ 10:17:14
I miss having a peach orchard! I grew up with a huge apple and peach orchard in my back yard. *sigh*
Jun 05, 2011 @ 10:45:44
Lucky!
Jun 05, 2011 @ 10:34:08
I love your paper bag trees. We’ve had absolutely no flowers on our apple trees this year. The hubby thinks he pruned them too hard. Ah, well… there’s always the berry bushes.
Jun 05, 2011 @ 10:46:59
And there’s always next year. That’s the approach we take with our ‘experiments’. Have you been able to harvest apples in the past or are your trees very young like ours?
Jun 05, 2011 @ 13:30:03
A few of the trees are very young and just planted them last year so no worries there but the other did have a number of fruit last year and this year nothing. I’ll just have to keep a closer eye on the husband when grabs the pruners.