Weekend DIY Home Improvement Projects - Fruit Trees and Fences #gardening

Our weekend projects continued over the past weekend. Since we're in the process of beginning a backyard garden, it only makes sense to plant fruit trees as part of our garden. We bought five fruit trees to plant on Saturday - peach, orange, pear, and two different kinds of apple trees. Notice the old fence in the background of the photo (above). Two weeks ago we replaced the fence on the south side of the backyard (see photo below) and the north side of the fence was our Sunday project.

When planting a tree, you should dig about twice the size of the planter that the tree comes in, making sure to loosen up the soil around the edges of the soil. We bought both native soil and mulch for each tree. As we set the trees into the holes, we mixed the new soil with some of the old soil, then put down a tree ring and filled each ring with mulch.

My new peach tree already has a couple of tiny peaches on it! I can't wait to see how many peaches our tree will give us this year.

This is my orange tree (above). It is much shorter than the other four trees we bought, but it has lots of blossoms ready to burst open on it, so I'm hopeful that we might get a few oranges from it. Often fruit trees don't produce fruit for a year or two after initial planting.

My new pear tree (below) is probably the tallest of the five trees, with branches already reaching in all directions. It has one big blossom on it, but a lot of little pods that look quite ready to open up.

We had to place the ring off-center a bit on the pear tree because there is a sprinkler system drip pipe in the ground here, so I added my ceramic snail on top of the mulch to balance the look. Please forgive the condition of the grass in my backyard. We're planning on lots of vegetable garden boxes, so we don't want to plant grass until we know where the boxes will stand.

This is the jonathan apple tree (below), with lots of opened blossoms and leaves. It's also a very tall tree. The back of our yard slopes down just a bit. When we bought the house last fall, there was already a crepe myrtle in the backyard, so when we planted the five trees we staggered the rows to give all the new tree roots lots of room to spread.

I noticed some ants and aphids on the two apple trees, so I'm working to find an organic solution to remove those. I'll let you know what works for me. I'm so excited at the prospect of growing the food we eat!

The pitiful-looking apple tree below is the red delicious apple tree. It's really not as pitiful as it looks, because it's got lots of healthy buds ready to pop out. However, I'm a bit worried about whether it will make it, since the store had over-watered it and the planter dirt did not dump out in a nice root ball. We planted it bare root and staked it with a leftover piece of fence pine.

The blossoms below are on my pitiful apple tree, so I know it has promise. I also blessed all my trees, because even though I planted them, I know God makes them grow. Although the photos don't show it in the pictures, we did go back around to all five new trees and staked them to the ground with string to help them stand steady against winds. Saturday was exhausting, but in a very good way!

On Sunday we ripped down the old rotted fence you can see in the first photo above. We replaced the 2x4s and the fence pickets, but were able to salvage the existing fence posts and reuse them. We were planning on reusing the old fence pickets for garden boxes, but they were so riddled with termites that they fell apart as the fence came down. 

I'm SO thankful that my husband is a hard worker and is willing to put this much work into creating our little backyard paradise. He's such a wonderful guy, he even volunteered to make dinner on Sunday night!

Stay tuned for more project posts!