Perfect Planting Weather

Friday Karen and I, aka the Sturdy Farmer Girls, drove up to the Bellsqueeze Road in Clinton to pick up our Fedco Tree order. As always, the Fedco warehouse was a busy place, but well organized, and we managed to pick up our large order, add lots of additional items to the order, and be on our way home in about 2 hours.

I had a big order in:
2 Bluecrop Blueberries
2 Elliott Blueberries
2 Earliblue Blueberries
1 Jersey Blueberry
1 Lonicera x brownii (native hybrid) Dropmore Scarlet Honeysuckle
1 Buddleia x weyeriana Honeycomb Butterfly Bush
1 Morden Sunrise rose
3 Cascade Hops
5 Thuja occidentalis American Arborvitae
5 Tsuga canadensis Hemlock

Everything came in with the exception of the hemlocks. I had hoped to add a "Blizzard" mock orange, and and an additional Ruby Spice Clethra. Well, upon examining the HUGE mock orange, supposedly at maturity 5-'6' by the same, I checked and sure enough, the catalog had a typo and the mockorange topped out at 10'x10' -- too big.

A helpful Fedco staffer pointed out instead a Joel Bush Cherry, maturing at about 4'x4' with edible cherry-like fruit in early autumn; I grabbed 2 excellent healthy plants. Of course that meant a few last minute plan changes, thus the measuring tape seen in the photo above.

Friday it was raining lightly, thus a perfect day to plant. I managed to get everything planted except the 5 Arborvitae, which are wrapped up in a cool spot in the barn. I had drawn a plan and measured all the planting spots earlier. It helped hugely that all the planting sites were ready for plants with the exception of the Arborvitae, which no doubt, is why they await planting.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how our new bed looks like as it matures. I still have a LOT of herbaceous perennials to transplant into the bed, and I need to add some kind of support for the honeysuckle vine to climb up the grapevine arbor, but the woody backbone is planted.