Planning Ahead

Planning Ahead

In my yard today, I tucked
In for their continued sleep
Two sweet little apple trees
Still in their deep winter slumber.

When they wake I hope
They are not too shocked
By their new bed.  I worked
Hard to smooth out the lumps.

I mixed them a comfortable
Mattress of rich, fluffy loam and
Refreshing compost then wrapped
Them under a warm blanket of mulch.

Ken Goree


I called this poem Planning Ahead, for a couple of reasons.  


First, I have a personal gardening philosophy.  A garden should be attractive.  I believe my neighbors agree and are probably pretty excited that I have started to finally move in that direction.  A garden should smell good, though I'm willing to flex on that for a a couple weeks in the off-season when the new compost comes in.  A garden should be, as much as possible, edible.  This all takes a bit of planning.  


Second, I have been planning for a while which type of apple tree I wanted.  For those of you who have seen my front yard, you know that it is quite small.  Because of that, small was definitely going to be part of the  plan.  I settled on the mini-dwarf apple tree which at full height is between six and eight feet tall.  This is the size that will allow me to plant next to the driveway, on the skinny side.  Then while I was looking at trees at Flower World one day, I say that they had mini-dwarf trees in the Honeycrisp variety.  The decision was made at that point.  I bought it a few days ago, but hadn't planted it, wanting to research the best technique.  I new it would need a pollinator, but figured all of the apple and crab apple trees in the neighborhood would take care of that.  Then during my reading I found that having one within 20 feet is often necessary.  So this morning, back to Flower World to pick up a buddy for tree number one.  The second one is the Liberty variety.  


A lot of planning, isn't it?  I also had to plan the supplies; compost, bone meal (didn't think that would sound right in the poem) and fertilizer.