I’d like to introduce you to the new additions to our family, or our home I should say… We start slow, with plants, vegetables, and trees. Maybe someday we’ll take the next step and get a cat or a dog. Anyway, I’d like you to meet Mr. Acer rubrum, Mr. Prunus maackii, and Miss Malus dolgo. They are all really darn good looking and stand tall and firm. We adopted them at age three, and they weigh in at 800-900 lbs.
This weekend we went to work and got three nice trees on our property. May is surely the month of planting and gardening, and we have really been getting a bit of landscaping done too. After a while of coming up with a vision and somewhat of a plan for our property, we went to Four Seasons Nursery and picked out our trees.
They are looking pretty good and healthy now that we got them to their new homes and their roots planted firm in the ground. I think they’re adapting nicely…
Amur Chokecherry
The Chokecherry tree is in the front yard, kind of along the side in a bed which we will fill with ornamental gravel and some shrubs. She is starting to be covered in soft white frilly flowers that look like snow.
Red Maple
Red made his way to the backyard, nestled in where we have a fire pit, landscaping rock, and soon will be accompanied with some big shrubs and gravel. Might look kind of small from the photo, but actually is about 13′ tall.
Dolgo Crabapple
And my favorite, the flowering Crabapple is looking right at home in the backyard near the garden. She is covered in pretty pink buds that are now blossoming into white flowers and will soon give us lots of good-sized crabapples to eat.
I really can’t wait to have this fruit and make jelly and Apple Butter to can for the winters! And I’m hoping the birds and deer know better than to try and beat me to the apples, or I will teach them! The Dolgo is so beautiful, completely covered in white blossoms in the Spring. She will someday reach about 30′ tall and look like this. We are going to get a dwarf or semi-dwarf apple tree soon to put by the Crabapple. The Dolgo happens to be a perfect pollinator for apple trees, and is sometimes added to apple orchards just for that reason. Someday we’ll get to enjoy a nice bumper crop of apples!
I’m kind of making it sound like it was a walk in the park getting these trees put in, but involved a lot of labor. Will used a tractor of a friend’s, and rented a Bobcat with a forklift for the day, and I helped with a lot of digging, watering, and raking. It was a lot of work!
Digging big holes… the root balls were 3′ wide and 2.5′ deep! …And digging big holes while talking on the phone.
The three trees on Will’s trailer weighed more than having two snowmobiles on it! It seemed like quite the feat to get these things off the trailer and over in their holes until we got the Bobcat rented with the forklift…
Then it was easy getting them into their spot! Now for the dirty work…
I hosed it down and got it all saturated as he filled it all in.
Yes I was working too, and covered in dirt… just quickly snapped a few pictures in between!
Soon enough she’s in there good, ready to withstand the annoying windstorms we get… (we hope), and free to grow.
We do live in a wind belt area at the bottom of a mountain, and get some pretty brutal wind storms and gusts sometimes, so we can’t be picking out any dinky trees to put out here, they’d get pretty beat up!
After doing that process three times and having a good 8 hour work day of landscaping, we were pretty happy it was done.
And dirty. And tired!
We’re really enjoying the new additions. Feels good to have another big project done that makes the house feel more homey and beautiful!
cooking all the thyme 