New plan: The fruit garden

Despite everything I said the other day about keeping to a minimum amount of food growing this year, I’m expanding the kitchen garden before it even exists. Or, well, incorporating more of what does exist into the future kitchen garden. Let me explain:

Below is my sketch from over the winter depicting my long-term plan to float a faux raised bed in the middle of the asphalt driveway somehow — a project to be figured out next year, as all my hard-earned pennies are being dug into the adjacent courtyard project this year—

And here’s the recent shot of the same view with the courtyard work underway—

As I was debating what to plant in the raised bed we made there where the corner of the house meets the courtyard/driveway, I really toyed with the idea of the tree component being a fruit tree. In California, we were lucky to have so many fruit trees. Pretty much every backyard in CA has a lemon tree, for starters — a thing it’s hard to learn to live without — but we also had peaches and plums and apples and persimmons (which, granted, the squirrels never shared with us). I debated putting in an apple tree here, but would want a very specific varietal and also my husband can no longer eat apples. He requested a pear, but that seemed likewise challenging, not least because you need two pear trees if you want fruit.

With so much else to decide and do, I abandoned the idea and just put ornamental plants in that bed. But as we embark on food growing season, at a time when it seems more and more pressing (in addition to being thrilling) to grow what we can for ourselves, I was looking at this photo thinking it just seems stupid — like such a missed opportunity — to not be using that corner bed for food.

I’ve also said I want a blueberry bush, and have thought I would put it in the eventual raised veg bed, but that would eat up a large chunk of what will not be a very big bed to begin with. And blueberries want acidic soil. You know what else wants acidic soil? A pear tree.

Weekend before last, I accompanied my friend Jen to Hudson Valley Seed Co and she happened to remark on a little cluster of bare-root fruit trees sitting in a bucket in the shop. Almost all apples ... and one or two pears. The pear varietal was Seckel, which is “semi self-pollinating” (which I take to mean maybe?), and in that moment, I decided: the corner bed will not be ornamental. It will be a fruit garden, bridging the future driveway potager and the courtyard.

The little bare-root pear tree — basically a stick with roots — came home with me that day, a day before a wretched heat wave, so it’s basically heeled into a nursery pot at the moment, waiting patiently in the shade. This (cold and rainy) weekend I picked out two blueberry bushes (‘Duke’ and ‘Nelson,’ because you definitely need two blueberries, I learned) and they’ve joined the pear in waiting. Very soon (maybe by nightfall!) the current occupants of the raised bed will be relocated to other parts of the garden; I’ll augment the soil; and the bed will be switched over to the pear, the Duke, the remaining ground cherries, and I hope to add some strawberries. (We’ll see how everyone feels about acidic soil.) Then I have a large container ready for Nelson — more on that choice another time.

This feels like righting the ship. Fruit garden ahoy!