Planting 40 Plum Trees!

It's not been ideal conditions for planting trees, really the ground is too wet - but as they say time waits for no man so I decided we'd get them in and see what happened. 

Helpers - my eldest was poorly. 

To start with we planted up a new hedge between us and the neighbours. For this we used cherry plum trees, just little whips, and every 10ft put in a Victoria plum (they were £5) as a standard. Not sure how this will turn out but it should be interesting. I've read lots of people saying it makes a good edible hedge but when asked no one seems to have tried it!

Pretending to be trees...

I think I might need to buy a few more trees next year as the hedge seems a little thin but I'll wait to see how they grow first.

Once we got these in we moved on to the other varieties of plum tree. I had a few that were to be planted in different locations. One at the back of my workshop, south facing so I hope these will be nice and early! And a few other plums in the grid pattern of my orchard to fill in a few gaps.

Then the last 10 were planted in a line in the orchard in a bit of an experiment in spacing. I decided to fit them in to plant them in a line a bit closer than I would normally and I'll just have to keep on top of the pruning.

I've planted these so that the top is the earliest ripening and as you go down the row they ripen later and later in the season. Should be interesting but no idea how well it will work when the trees get bigger. I've seen commercial orchards plant much closer than we would normally so hopefully it should be fine.

Really pleased with all the fruit I've added this year and there's still more to come! I've just ordered 10 gooseberries and 10 blackcurrants and have some others sat here ready to plant out, black raspberries, white blackberries, mulberries and others. I need to keep growing unusual veg for my garden club talks after all!

What fruit have you planted this year?

Is there any gaps in your fruit growing that you want to fill?