Eating Your Front Yard: Planting a Fruit Orchard in Ferndale

I planted the apple trees first. They came bare-rooted in a long, slim cardboard box from Grandpa Matt’s orchard in Coloma, Michigan. And, typical of a human who has spent too many hours watching Disney movies with small children, I immediately named them and gave them human traits.  I have to admit, I have a secret preference for Honey Crisp, she’s a sassy one, and the first one to be transplanted into Ferndale soil. She has actually been the only one to open an email account, and writes regular emails to Grandpa Matt, the expert on all things dwarf apple trees.

Why bother? Part of it’s my memory of our yard in Southwest Detroit, where my backyard tree census included a pear, two peach, and a plum tree.  The harvest kept us picking, cutting, blanching and freezing fruit for the better part of a weekend, and my two girls, sticky-faced and elbow-deep in peach peels learned something beyond how to make cobbler that day. Having a good sense of the home as a place where things are made, rather than strictly consumed teaches a competence that is not common in our “hurry, hurry” lives.

So, that’s why I wrote to Grandpa Matt’s Orchard

www.GrandpasOrchard.com and how I came to choose dwarf apple trees. I ordered Honey Crisp, Blondee, Zestar, Valstar and Ida Red varieties, because they cross-pollinate with each other. I purchased them for the spring planting in the bare root form and planted them Memorial Day weekend. I’ll let you know when fall planting time is coming up. So far I have seven trees in the front yard, including peach and plum trees. Grandpa Matt says they will take from two to four years to bear fruit, but for now, I am just concentrating on keeping them alive in this deluge/hothouse weather, not to mention the ants and aphids.

Keeping them alive may be more difficult than I thought for these apple trees, and also for the peach and plum trees that I ordered from Stark Nursery in Georgia. The bugs are feasting on them. Honey Crisp wrote to Grandpa Matt and he offered her this advice

“What those green bugs are are aphids.  Spraying with a suitable pesticide will help control them.  There may be some organic formulations you can use also. You can also try hosing the tree with water pretty good.  Try to direct a good spray from the hose to the undersides of the leaves and wash as many off as you can.  This will help reduce the population but not eliminate it though. The ants are collecting honeydew (sap that the bugs give off) from the aphids for food.  Lady beetles and their larvae are a helpful control too, so hopefully they will start turning out and eating the aphids too. Good Luck!”

With gardening I have been an impatient act first, think later kind of person. I realized that I skipped the step where I spray the leaves to get rid of the aphids, because physically removing them is the best way to reduce a pest population. In spite of releasing ladybugs and encouraging them to hang around by spraying the trees with sugar water, they flew away except for the ones that got eaten alive by the ants.

I had a plant emergency. My next step was to the Green Thumb Garden Center for a plant rescue. Gardener Nathaniel kindly sold me some organic pesticides.  I don’t even like the word pesticide because of the bee population decreasing. (I had to pollinate my own trees with a paintbrush and a teacup!)

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/usa_save_the_bees/?dicVNeb

But these are organic, and not going to be in your grandchildren’s fat cells. I’ll let you know how if this will stop the relentless chomping of the baby peach trees’ leaves.

Question of the day: Does it count as gardening if it’s a tree, a berry bush, or deliberately preserving a mulberry?

Are you a Ferndalian with a successful fruit tree or orchard story?