The Trees

It’s been quite the rollercoaster getting our hands dirty and diving headfirst into this project. We stumbled upon an ad on Facebook Marketplace offering four free fruit trees – two almonds and two apples. The only catch? We had to dig them up and give them a new home ourselves. So, we thought, "Why not?" and went for it, thinking it’d be a walk in the park.

We’ve got this spot in our garden plan marked out for a mini food forest, and it seemed like the perfect place to welcome these trees. But wow, we underestimated just how tough it would be to dig up four-year-old trees. The heat didn’t help either, and the ground where we first wanted to plant them turned out to be tough clay, leftovers from some old laneways. We had to shift our plans and plant them a bit further away than we’d hoped.

Realizing the job was bigger than we thought, I roped in my dad to help out, especially with the almond trees. We loaded them up on the trailer behind the troopy and got to work. What we thought would be a quick two-hour job ended up doubling as we hit a snag – I managed to get the troopy stuck in the muddiest spot in the paddock, thanks to last week’s rain.

Thankfully, Garry came through with his tractor and pulled us out of the mess. What started as a simple planting task turned into a four-hour adventure filled with a bit of stress but a lot of laughs.

The trees are now in the ground, getting plenty of water and TLC. We’re crossing our fingers that they bounce back strong and thrive in their new spot. This whole experience was a real learning curve for us. It reminded us that we’re definitely new to this and still figuring things out, but that’s all part of the adventure. Every mistake is a lesson, and we’re just excited to keep growing, both these trees and ourselves, in this journey towards building our little slice of permaculture paradise.