Die Manchmal Gruene Weide: Planting of Orchard and did I mention great neighbors?

I failed to publish last week even though we planted our first six peach trees in the orchard. Chalk it up to working 14 hour days and being too pooped to write.

We loaded the truck up with shovels, bags of mulch, a roll of wire fencing and so forth and headed out to Die Weide. I installed some gable trim but only did half the work because my boots were too slippery to work on the steel roof. Once I got down (carefully!) I started planning the tree spacing for the orchard. According to the Texas A & M ag web site, peach trees should have 9' foot diameter spacing and at least 18' on center from tree to tree. We mapped out a zig-zag pattern and dug holes and planted trees. As a bit of care and overkill, we put down black weed barrier cloth and covered that with mulch, leaving a space around the tree in the center as recommended in several articles. One thing a lot of articles said to do first was to kill grass and weeds around the tree area with herbicide, but I object to that and will take a chance with the weed barrier and mulch and diligent cutting/mowing of the area between the trees. I am not an organic fanatic, but don't feel comfortable dousing my land with herbicide. Our neighbor's fruit trees produce and look healthy and I don't see signs of weedkiller, so we'll see how that works out.

Did I mention great neighbors? The previous week I mentioned to Kenneth that I plan to rent a rototiller to put in a garden at the side of the shed and he said he had a plow that would turn over the sod. And there he came Saturday with the tractor and sod-busting plow. Although it took a bit of maneuvering around the shed, he plowed sod under for a 12' x 48' garden in which I plan to plant corn, greenbeans, black-eyed peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, and potatoes. He also mentioned that another nearby farmer was going to run a tractor-driven tiller over his garden and he might run it over mine too. So later that afternoon, I hear the tractor chugging along and here came Neil with a tiller to go over the freshly turned sod several times.

Here come the photos....