We had been talking for awhile now about how bad the economy has gotten and how expensive everything has become. Just the fundamentals in life like food and water just keep creeping in price. And if you want fresh fruit or vegetables, well it’s just plain ridiculous!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to supply some of our own fresh fruit? Oh, and even better if we had enough for preserves and jams! Growing up we always had apple trees, pear trees, black walnut trees, black berries, and dew berries readily available. I took it for granted as a child.
As kids when out playing we would just go pick an apple when we wanted one. I used to like to pick them green before they had ripened. I did suffer the random tummy ache because of eating too many!
We would help Mama pick black berries every year. There were huge black berry briar thickets all around us in the wild! Sometimes we’d have buckets and other times we’d have an old milk jug with the top cut off. Our fingers would be pricked and stained. I liked helping for awhile, but then of course I’d get hot and lose interest. Then it became a bother as I’d rather be playing. Oh, to have such days back.Have you ever seen a black walnut in it’s green hull? Mama, would have 5 gallon buckets full of them! She was determined to get those nasty pesky hulls off. She had this large thick flat rock that you’d see her many times beating the hull loose from a walnut shell with a hammer. We lived on a gravel dirt road with a gravel driveway. I remember when she poured those 5 gallon buckets all over the driveway and just drove on top of those suckers with the family car! That’d do it! I remember thinking back then that it was the funniest thing and that Mama was nuts. Then what do you have inside but a really hard dark black shell. But that was nothing compared to the hulls. She’d crack them and we’d eat them fresh with a little salt. She’d freeze them. We’d have them in pies and all kinds of baked goods. A black walnut just has such a distinct taste. It just has a little more something, something.
So, I guess as I get older and longed for such wonderful times and then look at the price of food today, I thought it would be so nice to grow some of our own fruits and nuts. We have little over an acre of land and already have 20+ trees (mostly pines, few pin oaks, and a couple of maples). So, our space is limited to say the least. We did some research on dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees and decided those would be our best bet with our size constraints. It would do no good to plant big ones and not have enough space for them to properly grow. Jon and I both wanted apple trees. He wanted peach trees. And I wanted some kind of nut trees figuring I’d be dead before I saw any nuts from them.
Pecan trees seemed like a sound choice as the nut shell is not as large and messy. None of our local nurseries, Walmart, nor Lowes carried pecan trees. Apple and peach trees were everywhere, but very few in a semi-dwarf variety and none in a dwarf variety. Our research has been conflicting on the difference between semi-dwarf and dwarf. Some places use the terms interchangeably, while others do not. Additionally, we couldn’t find all of the apple varieties we wanted. And of course it doesn’t help that it is at middle to end of April.
So, I started looking online at ordering some. Many places had already stopped their ordering of fruit trees for this season. Then there was the whole thing of cross-pollination. For pecan trees it got quite confusing as not all do well with each other. And well who would have thought it to be so difficult to find a nursery online that sells pecan trees at a reasonable price? I couldn’t find one nursery online to provide both. So, I ordered my fruit trees from one and my pecan trees from another. Now of course, I was too stingy to pay for shipping on either order so I decided to order some berries to round out the order enough to get free shipping.
Nursery #1: $85.76
- Belle of Georgia Peach Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- Elberta Peach Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- McIntosh Apple Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- Granny Smith Apple Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- Yellow Delicious Apple Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- Gala Apple Trees – Dwarf avail. (Tree Height: Dwarf 2-3ft (grows 40% normal size))
- Heritage Everbearing Raspberry
- Latham Red Raspberry
Nursery#2: $76.90
- Desirable Pecan Tree – 1-2 feet tall
- Pawnee Pecan Tree – 1-2 feet tall
- Brightwell Blueberry Plant – 2-3 feet tall
- Climax Blueberry Plant – 2-3 feet tall
- Ladyfinger Seedless Grape Vine – 2 yr
- Red Flame Seedless Grape Vine – 2 yr
Ouch! That was more than I really wanted to spend, but it will be a great investment. To make it worse, we’ll have to wait a few years on most to see anything produced from them.
I’ve done all the reading on their FAQ page and know that these trees will all come pre-pruned. All of the trees, bushes, and vines will come in a dormant state in some kind of gel stuff packed around the roots. Patience is not my best quality. I couldn’t wait for them to arrive!
