Building Our Backyard Orchard

We love fruit! Since we love fruit so much we thought we would utilize our backyard space by growing various fruit trees. One problem we had was, where to put our trees? We have goats and a sheep that we would like to let out once in awhile. Therefore we needed a fence to protect our trees from these wonderful but 'happy to eat everything in sight' beings! A fence was constructed, which took us two weekends to put up. We used 5 railroad ties in which we dug 2 1/2 foot holes to secure them and we used corral material from around the yard. The only thing we had to purchase for our fence was the fencing wire.

Getting ready for our fruit trees... in the last few months we have been collecting our trees. At the beginning of this project, we didn't really have a complete plan, just buy trees! However, through youtube and researching backyard orchards we have become more knowledgeable. Of course, there is still lots to learn but we are following advise from other sources who 'seem' to know what they are doing! Thanks to Dave Wilson's Nursery... awesome information... we have a plan! We are now using a fruit tree grow chart, this way we are buying trees that fruit at different times of the year. I have created our own grow chart of the trees we have, so we can see which months each tree should produce fruit. Through davewilsonsnursery.com we are growing some trees in one hole, called 4 in 1 planting, 3 in 1 planting, we are just doing three in one. The idea is, backyard gardens are not the same as commercial orchards... we don't need as much fruit. The idea of putting more trees in one hole is, the trees will not grow as large. With training and pruning you are going to have a tree that is small enough to reach up and pick your fruit. Plus by keeping the tree lower to ground and pruning you have lots of energy going to the fruit you do have.

Ready for our fruit trees... our first few trees were picked up from home depot. George is a big fan of craigslist and found trees in temecula for $4.00 a tree and purchased 7 trees. Wow, what a deal! We picked up 2 more trees at a 17 acre nursery real close to our house. Our last trees purchased, a craigslist find, was in west covina. An elder guy, Bill Fischer, had plants lined up in his driveway. It was so cool seeing his place. He had lots of advise and had some examples of 3 in 1 planting where the trees were 15 to 20 years old. His property, which was like an average sized home in Long Beach, was loaded with fruit trees. He didn't even know how many he had. Well, I was totally inspired, my mind was going crazy, "I can totally do this!" (laughing) Everywhere you looked something was growing... food! Granted I don't think we really know the work we are giving ourselves but it sure is fun!

The way I look at this process is, food is something we need! Why not grow it? A recent goal for myself is to inspire myself and hopefully inspire someone else to grow something. I encourage my friends, well the ones that aren't already grow something, but those of you that don't, to try and grow one thing this year that gives you food! It's exciting, it's nutritious, it's nature! Watch it grow, be amazed at the simple things in life... is that corny, sorry but I'm totally in it right now! (laughing)

click on the picture below to see more photos

fruit garden

Trees we are planting:
Apple (fuji, pink lady, anna)
Apricot (one from seed, if this one doesn't work we will may eventually graft another type of tree to it, and a royal rosa)
Pluot (flavor king)
Nectarine (goldmine, snow queen)
Peach (red baron)
Persimmon (fuyu)
Asian Pear (1 tree with 4 grafts, bartlett, shinseiki, hosui, shinsui)
Plum (santa rosa)

Citrus include:
Navel Orange
Valencia Orange
Tangelo
Tangerine