Three Trees

With sore muscles from Saturday's tree hole digging, we continued with the same motion and kept digging some more on Sunday. This time it was for the vegetable beds. We dug one little trench for peas - 1 by 17 feet, and one for leafy greens and other vegetables - 3 by 17 feet.



Then we went to get trees from the Mesquite Valley Growers Nursery, which happens to be the largest nursery in town. They have a huge selection of everything, and they got very good reviews. Indeed, they helped us find the most beautiful trees:



The farthest away, by the shed, is a semi-dwarf redblush grapefruit tree. This means that it will only grow to about 12 feet. On the left is a Janice Seedless Kadota fig tree, whose fruits were rated best-tasting at a 1996 Dave Wilson Nursery fruit tasting. And at the front - hopefully the largest tree, so its canopy might shade the office in the hot summer mornings - Fuyu persimmon! I always thought I hated persimmon, but I guess I just never had good ones. We recently bought one to try, and I realized that it is an absolutely delicious fruit. I can't wait to try ours!

Before sticking the trees in the ground we put some (2") gypsum and mixed it with the hard bottom of the hole. This is supposed to soften the soil. On top of it we layered compost, peat moss (for increasing the acidity), and the original soil, mixing the layers as we went. It took about an hour to finish each of the trees. We did the same with vegetable beds, one of which, the little one of the peas, you can see in the tree picture above. We ended up working on it in the dark, with only the moon and the measly porch light to show us what we were doing.