New plants :)

The fruit selling is going well, not yielding hundreds of dollars yet, but giving me enough to purchase some starter plants. After saving all profits for a few weeks I went and splurged at the local nursery and bought:

- 1 Avocado tree (Hass) which is about 5 foot tall and should be productive within 2 years
- 2 Blueberry bushes (Northland and Denise)
- 7 Raspberry canes (Nootka, Autumn Heritage, Chilliwack)
- 11 Strawberry plants
- Peat bricks (for planting the avocado tree)

The Strawberries like to be planted on top of a mound and then mulched with straw, or in my case, sugarcane mulch generously left by the farm's former owners.

Strawberry mounds, mulched well with Sugarcane mulch

Northland Blueberry

It might sound incredibly ignorant, but I didn't even know that different varieties of the same type of plant fruit at different times of the year! So the idea of buying several varieties of berries is that they fruit at different times of the year and you get fresh fruit for longer periods.

Denise blueberries will fruit early October to January and Northland will fruit for a different and longer period, December to March. With a bit of luck we'll have blueberries for 6 months of the year!

The same applies to the Raspberries. These I had to plant in a particular way, along a supporting fence oriented North-South for even sunlight. I needed to dig a trench along the bottom of the fence and add manure and peat to the soil before planting. The peat I bought at the nursery and the manure I was lucky enough to get for free from a neighbour with horses :)

Blueberry bushes and Raspberry canes planted and ready to go!

Woohoo! Free horse poo!

The Avocado tree needed special attention, apparently my usual method of planting trees (just sticking them in the ground) wasn't going to cut it.

So I chose a nice, sheltered spot with at least 4 hours of sunlight per day. There is a slope to the site to aid drainage as Avocados need well drained soil. I dug the hole and added peat to the bottom as per the advice of the lovely lady at Town Centre Nursery in Mirboo North then popped in my new tree, built a mound around the base, dug a channel on each side to hold excess water and hoped for the best!