stark bros – Peacock Orchard

I have bought many, many plants for our property from many different sources. I thought I would recommend a few here.

This is where I bought my very first fruit and nut trees. I ordered in July, and had them sent to me immediately; all of my trees arrived well packaged, alive and grew amazingly well. I am very satisfied with all of my interactions with this company and have spent far too much money buying all of the amazing trees they advertise. Every time I go to their site I’m like a kid in a candy store. Someone, please, help!

This year’s order was extremely large and I had some mild complaints. It was nothing they could control, the weather was freaky bad and many people had nursery plants struggling. Stark took some of the plants I had ordered off as they were not up to standards. I hated that but I understood the reasoning.

Arberfoyle.org

I bought my first 10 grape vines from this amazing website. I bought 5 Frontenac and 5 Valiant. The grapes arrived in perfect condition and even held over while I wasted time preparing the ground for them. These grapes did not survive though. I do believe that is more of my user error than the grapes themselves. I had a huge problem with mold and fungus and I don’t believe I was watering enough. Then I transplanted them and yeah, bad.

Oikostreecrops.com

This was recommended by someone on Permies.com, so I clicked over and began perusing the various offerings. The trees are sent much smaller than those bought on Starkbros but they are also much cheaper with a different selection. I bought an apricot, some persimmons and various nut trees from this site. They all arrived in great condition and have been doing very well outside.

Cold Stream Farm

I loved this nursery for bulk orders. I ordered a bunch of hazelnut, black locust, oak, mulberry and maple from them. I also ordered a witch hazel which is beautiful. I have to get more!

Gurneys.com

I bought 10 Reliance grapes from Gurneys. They arrived and I planted immediately. They are coming out of dormancy now and all appear alive. I was very pleased about the size of the roots on these.

Greencoverseed.com

This is where I bought a variety of cover crop seeds. I loved their selection. It was kind of addicting looking at the selections. I did have problems ordering but again, it was me, not them. Shipping is expensive but it is everywhere. I had some pretty big orders and they all arrived well packaged and labeled. The seeds are coming up and I’m very pleased with them.

Circle S Seeds

This company sent us our Delaney Sainfoin. We planted it and it sprouted and is coming up all over in a week’s timeframe. In fact, if you heard how we planted it you’d be shaking your head. We simply took the grader-scraper to the soil and then broadcast seeded. I’m really happy with these seeds!

Johnny’s Selected Seeds

I bought a fair amount of kitchen garden seeds from them. Time will tell how they do but I think they were pretty great.

Ebay

I did a lot of shopping on Ebay. What can’t you find on Ebay? I bought bamboo, Russian almond, pomegranate, mulberries, grape cuttings, pineberry seeds, grape seeds, kiwi plants and on and on. I made sure to check the sellers rating before buying but I am really happy with how it all turned out. You can see a lot of those plants in my “Gardening in Winter” post.

NONE of these are affiliate links of any sort. This is simply my experience stated for your benefit.

I ordered my trees from Stark Bros and had them delivered in July, not a suggested time for tree planting but it is what it is. I immediately began my earthworks after placing the order. Then I painted tree stakes and laid out my plantings. I finished just in time.

I was amazed at how small the boxes were, and a little wary. I began unboxing and soaking my trees immediately.

Please excuse the mish mash of detritus in this picture. This is my unboxed tree showing some leaf budding. I went about painting the trees white while they soaked. It was July and I did not want my new trees to get sun burn.

All painted! You can see that I have a lot of shredded paper in there with my plants. I wasn’t going to be able to plant them all in one day, as I had 36 and was planting alone, so I “hilled” them in their containers.

Here is a happily planted and mulched tree looking very much like a stick. I just knew it would grow into a beauty! You can also see my hand painted stake used to identify the tree and plan out the planting.

It took some time but I managed to get one full berm planted and mulched. I left spaces in some spots for cherry trees, which had been sold out when I’d placed my order. The mulch is extremely moldy straw that has been sitting in a corner of our property since before we moved in.

I was extremely happy to find that within weeks I had some beautiful leafing. I was concerned about two of my trees though as they were not showing leaves. I hoped they made it. Thankfully they did, they just took a lot longer to adjust than the others.

Now look at this, a very happy boy helping me show the height and growth of our trees. This tree just shot out quite impressively. It is a Superior Plum tree, standard sized. My son happily walked the berm line with me nightly, talking about how excited he was to pick fruit off of the trees. I don’t believe he realized how long he’d be waiting though.

I did have some issues though. I am not positive but I believe we had some blight. You can see the black leaves in this picture. I took shears and cut all the black off, bleaching between prunings, and then burned the clippings. I hope I do not see it this year.

After I planted the trees I threw out a great variety of herb, salad, vegetable and flower seeds. It was late in the season but I had some amazing lettuce growth. This lettuce reached 3 feet in diameter with leaves bigger than my head. I had poppies and nasturtium do well. I also had a ton of various lettuces.

I cut some bushes down and threw all of the branches into my swales.

Most of the berm produce went to the poultry. I did save what seeds I could for this springs planting. The kids loved bringing the poultry goodies.

I find kids will try about anything if they can pick it. Though that doesn’t mean they’ll like it, as seen here:

We had quite a few beets grow and the turnips grew absolutely massive in size. My son happily washed and bit into every plant he picked. He thought the beet was sweet but he had quite an attack when he bit into a turnip. I licked it and understood why, it was incredibly spicy. The chickens adored those turnips though.

(excuse the mattress behind the kids in this picture. It is our old bed, which I stripped down to the frame and intend to use as a trellis this spring. You can see the stripped frame in one of the pictures below.)

I did prune, not much, but a bit. My Son was anxious to help me with that job. Here he is cutting some suckers off of the bottom of the tree. Great view of one of my tree markers as well. Superior is the type of fruit, Then you can see Plum written under it and the S stands for Standard sized root stock. So this will be a standard sized superior plum tree.

Then it was fall and time to protect my trees. I ended up transplanting my grapes onto the berms, under the standard sized fruit trees. Where I planted a grape I used cement to hold down the mulch. It has worked quite well so far. I used the walls of tires to hold the mulch down around my black walnut trees. That has also been a successful method of holding mulch. We get some impressively fierce winds out here, 40-50mph is normal for us.

Now to wait and see what happens this spring. Did all of my trees survive? I am hopeful. The berms and swales did an impressive job of collecting snow so I believe my trees have received a decent amount of water. It has been a rather dry winter so far. We still have snow collected in the swales and in some of the water diversion ditches so I would say the earthworks did the trick.

Tag: stark bros

My current plant and tree sources

Orchard planting and seasonal progression- Year 1