New Fruit for 2017

This year John has decided to make an orchard out of part of one of his fields, the one right in front of our home. He's mapped out a plan to add about 14 new trees in the next few years.

This weekend he planted the first four - all peaches.  There's 3 Rio Grande and one LaFeliciana. Our oldest peach tree is a Rio Grande and we love the peaches that come from that tree. Freestone and early, it ripens in late May/June and is just a very pretty, sweet peach.

The LaFeliciana is new to us, but we chose it because it only requires about 400 hours of chill weather and it's supposedly a later (July) ripening peach. It was developed in Louisiana for the south.

I spent an hour or so cleaning up under our Chester Blackberry patch and mulching it with composted turkey bedding - and fertilizing them.  We had a pretty good bunch of berries from these plants last year and are expecting even more this year!

I'll be planting the other berries that I've been rooting in the greenhouse all winter.  There's some Apache Blackberries that took off, and a few Black Raspberries (sadly only about 3 of the dozen canes look like they are viable. We'll see when I dig them out.)