Orchard 1: Intro

This is the first of several posts on Terribly Happy’s orchard, where I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two years. In some places I include a lot of details, which are directed not so much at casual readers—though perhaps they’ll find something to interest, entertain, or both—as at others who are doing (or thinking about doing) something similar.

When we first visited this property on 3 May 2010, the northern half of it was enclosed in an 8-foot deer fence. Inside the fence were many young fruit and nut trees, swimming in an ocean of 2- and 3-foot high grass:

We’ve become good friends with John Hogan, the previous owner, who planted everything in the orchard and still lives in Cottage Grove. I can use his purchase records to construct this table:

Large areas inside the fence were open grass. The area also included a 96’ x 30’ high tunnel, or hoop house, which the owners before John had used as a greenhouse before its canvas was shredded in a windstorm.

The high tunnel, or hoop house.

Though the area was only partially planted, Beth and I called it “the orchard” and considered it a key reason to buy the place. I’ve more or less been the main “tree person” in the household from the start, not because I had more previous experience (I had little, just like Beth) but because the scale of the project appealed to me more.

We moved in on 10 June 2010, and that summer was a pretty crazy time here at Terribly Happy. Much of our energy was directed to preparing for the upcoming massive house remodel, and in mid-August I would start my 10-days-at-home, 20-days-in-San José routine, so we didn’t undertake any major projects outside of the house. Beth began a small kitchen garden, and I slowly started to learn the rhythms of rural life, in general, and of the plants on our four acres, in particular.

My main focus in summer and fall 2010 (in addition to chairing SJSU’s Geology Department) was the coming transformation of the north lawn into an edible forest garden (see early Dec 2012 posts about that). But the future of the orchard continued to simmer on my brain’s backburner. By late fall, I had settled on these goals for the orchard:
* Grow food! Evaluate the existing crops, and plant other ones. See what works, and decide later whether to focus on a few crops or to continue growing a wide range of them.
* Grow trees specifically intended to provide firewood.
* Experiment with companion planting and cover crops.
* Figure out what to do with the hoop house.
* Postpone installation of a permanent irrigation system until I’ve made all other major decisions about the configuration of the orchard.

What has happened since then? Orchard posts #2 through #6 explain much of it. Meanwhile, consider this pair of photos of roughly the same view, taken 28 months apart. While the later one is from early fall and thus shows trees fully leafed out, you can clearly see rapid growth.

May 2010

Sept 2012 (foreground trees planted in early 2012)