Orchard update and more greenhouse progress pictures

A few months ago, I shared a bit about Big Ridge agriculture. Here’s a small update on our progress.

The greenhouse is coming along:

We’ve been expanding the orchard. This spring we added five cold-tolerant peach trees, plus a Keiffer pear and a Rabun Bald apple. So in addition to the two ancient June apple trees (that are approaching their end of life), we now have eighteen young heritage fruit trees in the orchard. A few are grafts from our old June apple trees, the pear and the rest of the apples came from Century Farm Orchard, and the peach trees came from Trees of Antiquity.

That doesn’t include our four Dunstan chestnuts (Chinese x American blight-resistant hybrids) growing in the nursery by the well shed. These trees are getting large enough for us to find their permanent home, and I am thinking up by the road.

As it happens, my uncle (the grandfather of the young man on the ladder above) had his first chestnut hybrid this year (five years after planting his Dunstans), so hopefully we aren’t that far behind him.

I’m also growing a bunch of grandchildren of the tree that held our old tree swing in Atlanta (I think of the Big Ridge tree swing as its sister). The greenhouse will be home to a much larger seedling operation. These (plus a bunch of oaks, ginkgos, hickory, and many others) will be available for purchase in the fall.