To give our trees the best possible chance of growth without an irrigation system, we are planting them in the fall.  Today we marked off where we want them to be placed.  Unfortunately, the varieties that are more resistant to scab and other issues were too difficult to successfully grow from bare roots.  These special varieties must be obtained from far away nurseries, so bare roots were our only option. We have had to change course and will go with 4 local varieties: Red Fuji, Honeycrisp, Gala, and Yellow Delicious.  Their placement deliberately takes into account their pollination times, and cross-pollination needs.

Well, in the last post, I mentioned the snow.  There were some flurries and hail earlier this week.  For the most part, it was a very rainy summer.  But the cold still kind of surprised us.  The hail and sleet happened on the day we were finalizing placement of our next attempt at apple tree planting.  It will be warmer again next week, in the 60s– so our planting should work out fine.

Here are pics from one of our harvest days.

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Family was in town, and the boys were excited to show their crop.  We couldn’t take the truck and fit everyone, so we took the SUV.  We were still able to fit a good number of pumpkins in the SUV’s trunk that day.  My apologies for the sideways and upside down pics– the editing functions are not working for me today.  You can still get an idea of our harvest, hopefully.

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Well, a lot has happened since our last post.  The biggest things is that we have a new baby!  The arrival of new baby delayed my posting on the pumpkin patch progress.  It is already October.  We harvested our pumpkins a couple weeks ago.

Here are some pics of our pumpkins as they grew:

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I will post pics from part of our harvest in the next post.