Today in the orchard
Squash in the UK, November 2024. Wow!
Adjacent to our Finley Lane orchard is our nursery. It is there that we plant our newly grafted trees and our young seedlings. They spend their “formative” years—usually 2 or 3—in the Nursery before being transplanted to the orchard, sold or given away. The Nursery is about a half acre and has enough room that we can rotate our trees around. We don’t want to grow the young trees in the same soil year after year. So we grow them in one spot until ready to dig. Then, once we clear out that section, we rotate in other crops. Typically we plant garlic one year and potatoes the next. Then we plant young nursery trees again. The Nursery is a good spot to plant our breeding-project pepper plants. We plant them there to keep them isolated from our other peppers as they cross-pollinate easily.
We often have bits of other free space as well. Since “nature abhors a vacuum”, we fill it in with more plants. Last year it was wheat. This year we’re planting some unusual squash, pumpkins and melons. Today I spent several hours clearing out the weeds from our new patch and turning over the soil—all by hand. The weeds were about three feet tall so it was a lot of work. By day’s end the bed looked almost ready to go. We’ll do a few finishing touches tomorrow and plant on Friday.
