Appleton's Nursery Delivery

Last year's big purchase of plants was all my fruit trees. I've now got around 40 trees out in my orchard. This year's big purchase are two kinds of more practical trees, and something I bought on a whim.

I came home on Monday morning to find a package the postie had left at my gate. I keep the gate closed because, as I've probably mentioned before, South Neighbour's fence isn't too great. This means that if my gate is open, I get cows or sheep in my front yard, and at worst, in my back yard and field. This is a problem because they tend to do things like eat whatever I have planted around, including my citrus. My grapefruit is still recovering.

The packaging is quite solid. There is a whole covering of plastic, inside a whole covering of very sturdy paper.

The inner plastic bag helps keep the roots wet, as the trees have to be bare rooted to ship this way. Note there are 80 bare rooted plants in all packaged into this.

There are 20 sugar maple (acer saccharum), 50 hazelnut (corylus avellana) and 10 black chokeberry (aronia melanocarpa).

For now, I've heeled them in wet sawdust. This will help kill off the remaining odd leaf, and let them survive dormant, until the weather comes a bit better so I can plant them out.

Regarding the sugar maples, there was an article about someone up in Nelson who planted a lot of these out 20 years ago, and how they're just coming ready to harvest maple syrup from. And any time you mention them, you get some 'negative nancy' who says how you need a certain amount of frost which I wouldn't likely get, to be able to get maple syrup from them. They're an experiment for me. A recent article detailed a way in which you can get maple syrup sooner, and with less required frosts.

The hazelnuts might produce decent nuts. But they will be seed grown, which makes that not a certain thing. So, it'll be a source for coppiced wood. And I'll also have the opportunity to graft known varieties of hazelnut to them, once they've grown to a decent size.

The chokeberry. Well, I'd read a bit about them in some book or on some web sites, around the time I ordered. I don't remember why I ordered them, but they should add a nice bit of variety to the berry orchard. I'd probably have around 25 berry plants, in addition to the 40 fruit trees mentioned earlier. It's also not likely to be common, so I should be able to trade it for other plants or varieties of plants I already have, at a later point once I've rooted some cuttings.