Fruit Tree Dreams!

The people who sold me this "most wonderful of forever homes" planted 14 fruit trees. They also had maybe 5 types of berry bushes in pots that they left. There are also 2 older apple trees of a mysterious varieties. The one in the front definitely has 3 types of apple grafted to it. And the one in the back got blown over at some point and is a feast for bugs although it still produced quite a few apples... either way it is on its way out so I need to start a replacement. I think most of the young trees survived (although at least 3 of them did not) A buck came through and absolutely demolished the nectarine tree that they had planted and when I was pruning some of them back I found only dead wood. Because we do like the deer but we also like our trees we decided to cage them. Which so far has seemed to work really well! One of my plans is to make fruit teas, so with that in mind I planted the first of hopefully several tea bushes and I am going to add significantly to the orchard. I lucked out and got on Four Winds website just as they started their bareroot tree sale. So I now have 12 new fruit trees on the way! I have been haunting the websites of FedCo, Trees of Antiquity and several others for months now. But I will probably wait until next year to place a large order. It is a tough for me to decide how to move forward. Trees, once established will just grow without much attention. And they need to grow for about 3 to 5 years before they will bear fruit. So it makes the most sense to stick them in the ground now and get the clock ticking. But we have a lot of work to do, a lot of decisions to make, and a lot to learn about the property (such as where does the sun go, where is the water table high, where are our property lines exactly...) So I am trying to do both at the same time... We will see how that works out!! In the mean time, we will have maybe 21ish fruit trees in the ground by April. Which is pretty exciting! Oh, oh, and I went to a nursery nearby to check out their tree selection and they had a mystery apple and a Rainier cherry on clearance (I am guessing like 4 or 5 year old trees) and an Italian plum. So I take it back, I will have at least 24 fruit trees this summer!