Planting Fruit Trees and Vegetable Garden Preparation

Our plans for Honeydale include the establishment of an orchard.  We went to Pohlman’s Nursery and brought 14 fruit trees.  Most were various varieties of citrus fruits but we also got an avocado, fig, mango, pomegranate and a custard apple tree.

Some of our native trees - only missing koala's!

The previous owners had planted two tropical peach trees, an olive tree, two citrus trees (we don’t know what exactly they are), a macadamia and a avocado tree.  All these trees needed some TLC so we gave the macadamia, the olive and citrus trees a prune and mulching.  Pruning the avocado and peach trees would reduce the chance of harvesting fruit later this season.  So they will be pruned during their dormant season.

We spent the day digging holes, squaring up the holes and planting trees.  One of the first holes we drilled was very easy and we got carried away.

After early success we thought it would be a simple task, but we could not dig the last six holes, as the soil was very hard clay.  This delayed us, as we had to find six suitable locations where we could dig holes.   However, we managed to get all the trees planted and watered in by the end of the day.

Earlier in the weekend we spent a day ripping the garden to loosen the subsoil then used a rotary hoe to mix in the old mulch, clay breaker, dolomite and horse manure.  At the end of the process we had a good garden bed and planted out our raspberry and black berry canes, some pumpkin seeds, chilli seedlings and sweet corn. 

Freshly tilled garden beds

Unfortunately we had to manually prepare beds in the shade house for strawberries and mixed salad greens.  But we were buoyed when we saw the rocket and spinach that we planted last week had sprouted.

Planting Strawberries