An apple a day

Another beautiful cold, crisp North East day today, which was perfect for planting the last of the fruit trees - a Stella cherry - in the new community orchard just outside the allotment.

So now the orchard is all planted, in a few years time we'll hopefully be looking at providing not only an apple a day, but plums, damsons, pears and cherries too.

This site is already looking much better, thanks to a good clear of all the plastic, general rubbish and bricks (which has been a joint effort between me and members of the Boy's Club) and a thorough mulch.

Hopefully, we'll soon get the go-ahead to run the willow fence making workshop, which will make the trees a little more secure, as they're a little exposed at the moment.

There are plenty of good books on how to plant bare-rooted trees, but the basic principle is to dig a large, but not too deep, hole to start with (normally a metre square is fine) and loosen the earth. This allows the roots to branch out without too much trouble.

Then dig a deeper hole within the centre of the larger hole, wide enough to take the roots of your tree and deep enough to allow the tree to be planted at the same level as it was in the nursery (you can tell by the change in colour on the trunk).

Before placing the tree in the hole, put in a few large handfuls of well-rotted compost or manure on the bottom, a sprinkling of blood, fish and bone. Hold the tree firmly upright as the earth is placed back in and gently shake it at intervals to ensure you don't get gaps between the roots (it helps to have another pair of hands at this point!)

After putting all the earth back in, gently firm down the soil around the trunk with your foot, water, and mulch.

I didn't mean to do much on the allotment today, but I still spent a few hours there. I tided up the strawberries on the edge of the asparagus bed, which had gone a bit mad with their runners everywhere, and managed to gather enough healthy small plants to fill the spaces in the strawberry barrel in the polytunnel. The Jerusalem artichoke bed also got a good mulch, as did the strawberries.