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Planting the Trees

Planting the Trees

Planting the Trees

After a couple of months of careful preparation, we are ready to plant the peach trees. We purchased our trees from Womack’s Nursery in De Leon, TX. We have been buying trees from them since about 2010 and have consistently been happy with the stock we received from them. In 2015 we planted 129 trees in total.

The types we planted are:

  • 26 Redglobe
  • 26 Redskin
  • 77 Monroe

There are a lot of different types of peach trees that you can choose from that would grow in our area. Womack’s typically stocks a great list of trees well suited to our area. If in doubt, tell them where you’re planting and they can make some solid recommendations.

26 Trees In each Row. There are 3 rows of Monroe Peaches, but the big rock is in one of those rows so there’s 77 trees instead of 78.

Bare Roots, Not Pots

If you’re like most people when you think about planting a tree, you think about a tree in a 1 or 5 gallon pot like you would see at a local nursery or home improvement store. I’m here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong! Not only are you buying a container full of dirt (that you dont even want), but that dirt is hiding the most important part of the tree – the roots! With all that dirt you cant see what shape the roots are in. The roots store are the storehouse that the tree will draw from when it starts growing in the spring. Last fall your new tree stored up all of it’s energy in the roots in anticipation of the coming spring. If the roots are broken or damaged, then the tree wont do well when it starts to leaf out. When you purchase a tree from Womack’s you’re buying a bare root tree. It’s just what it sounds like, trees with roots that are bare naked. There’s more reason for buying trees like this, but that’s a story for another time.

Straight Lines

We wanted the orchard to at least look like we knew what we were doing, so we made careful efforts to plant the trees in a straight line. Braided steel rigging wire was the answer to that and it was strung up across the entire 500 ft rows of peach trees before planting. A 100ft tape measure gave us consistent 24 ft spacing on our trees. We marked the wire so that we could reuse it on the rest of the rows in the orchard and plant the following trees exactly the same as the first row of trees.

Green X Marking where the tree will be planted.

Diggin’ Holes

The first peach tree ever planted at the orchard.

So maybe this isn’t obvious, but it’s a bad idea to use an auger to dig the holes for your trees. This isn’t always the case, but it’s certainly more likely if you have clay soil. I can explain more in another post, but the end result of that fact is that we had to dig 129 holes. By hand. With a shovel. Dang. The image here is the first tree we ever planted in the orchard.

3 Days Later

All in all it took 3 days to get all 129 of the trees planted. I had to do the lion’s share of the planting myself, but we’ll give Tiffany a pass. She had just delivered a baby a month prior and was still on the mend. In December 2016 we are hoping to plant 500 trees, so maybe I’ll have a baby and she can plant all of the trees!

Graham

Trees are awesome. In a world where everything is dominated by instant gratification, working with a tree that must be nurtured for years forces you to slow down and appreciate the value of hard work.

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