Fruit Trees

My wife comes home one day from stopping by her Dad's house. She regales me of how her Dad is buying fruit trees from Stark Brothers and they are currently having a special where orders ship for free. And the special was ending that night.

At first I was a bit resistant to getting fruit trees for our suburb-scape grass patch in the back of the house. Em and I have been dreaming for a while on finding a little bit of land that we can comfortably raise small animals (chickens and rabbits and children) and grow a sizable garden. So she wanted to "practice" with some trees right now. I really didn't want to put in too much effort and money into something we won't get to reap the full benefits of since we kinda want to find a farmhouse and live there. That and our backyard (more often than not) is full of stagnate rainwater that won't drain into the ground due to bad engineering or super clay-ey soil or both.

She reminded me that I have some "ill-gotten gains" (Her words, not mine) coming my way after I play bass in Footloose at my old high school. (Which by the way is going to be really fun to play...several bass solos I need to work on...and I get to hang out with my Mom.) So I sunk about $100 in two apple trees and an apricot tree with some assorted fertilizer and soil enrichers (Our dirt is junk that they used to make the houses sit a bit higher.)

The trees were shipped from Missouri and arrived this week and last night under the light of twinkling stars and my headlamp I dug holes and planted the trees. I was pleasantly surprised that the dirt where we planted the trees is a lot better than the dirt close to our house where we have some small garden beds. (We had to put in manure and topsoil to make it usable.)

And now we have three 3-4 foot sticks in our backyard that will hopefully grow fruit in 2-5 years. I kinda excited.