Fruit Trees!

I love the idea of growing my own fruit, and with that in mind I planted a small orchard last year on an additional piece of property that we own about 5 miles away.  It's a 5 acre parcel and we hope to some day build on it, thus selling our current house. Because of this, I have been abstaining from planting trees on our current property. I know it would break my heart to part with them, especially if they were mature and producing fruit. However, I'm one of those people who enjoys coming home from work and checking on the garden, pulling a few weeds or doing some trimming. Having the orchard off site does not give me the day to day satisfaction of watching the trees grow and fussing with them. So today I gave in and decided to add a few trees to my existing garden area (actually I succombed to my envy of another central Florida gardening blogger bragging about peach and plum harvests from the fruit trees in his yard).  I located a small local fruit tree nursery and paid them a visit, Twin Cedars Nursery on SR 50 just east of Brooksville.  I was impressed with the selection and quality of the plant material, and the pricing was very reasonable.  I enjoyed chatting with the nursery owner, who was very informative, sharing with me local knowledge and performance expectations for the plant material.  I ended up purchasing a Gulf Beauty Plum, a Florida Belle Peach and a Mullberry that the owner refers to as a Clayton (after the property owner whose tree the nursery owner collected cuttings from, he assures me the taste of the fruit will convince me the effort was worth it).

The information I received about these trees: Plum 'Gulf Beauty' - scab resistant, heavy producer with good flavor, and does not need a pollinator (according to the nursery owner, not IFAS).  Peach 'Florida Belle' - older variety that produces larger fruit, great flavor, self pollinated and very low chill hours. As for the Clayton Mullberry, I have no idea what to expect, but I was told that the fruit will taste amazing.

The first step was to amend the bed areas where I was installing the trees. As all Central Florida gardeners know, our soil is pretty sandy. Lucky for me, our neighbors had a couple of large Live Oaks cut down and chipped up a little over a year ago. This mulch has been sitting in their yard just cooking into a beautiful, earthworm filled compost. So I took a couple of wheelbarrow loads of this and worked it into the soil with my beloved garden weasel.  I bought this little gem from Big Lots for $10 on a whim and have found it's the perfect tool for working small areas of soil.  Then the only thing left was to install my trees, and hope the dogs don't pull them out.  They should do well in their new home as they will be getting full sun and are under irrigation.