[nndl] Fruit Trees

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Greetings, concerned citizens:

I promised a number of people an update on bulk ordering Texas-raised
fruit trees, so am now spamming the neighborhood lists with this
information (Martha, please forward to the Ridgetop list). Last year we
got up at 4:00am and drove down to East Texas (near the Louisiana
border) in order to buy 35-40 fruit trees from the only genuine fruit
tree cultivator I could find in the state of Texas, Bob Wells Nursery.
(The gory details of some of this can be found in the unabridged version
of the newsletter article http://spaklandgnome.info/orchard ).

In order to avoid driving to East Texas again (once is enough, believe
me), I've been having discussions with Ken Taylor, the friendly new
manager of the resurrected Howard's Nursery on Ave. F (the official name
of the business escapes me at the moment). To make a long story short,
Ken has been unable (so far) to get approval from the owners to do a
bulk fruit tree order for the neighborhood. It looks like this is just
not going to gel for this year's growing season.

On a brighter note, gardeners' take note: Ken carries bulk garden soils
and mulch equivalent to what you get at Natural Gardener, but much
closer to home and at a much lower price. He's also very willing to
special order things like Sweet Olive (osmanthus fragrans), Chinese
Witchhazel (hamamelis mollis), or other hard to find to fun plants you
might want to try your hand at growing.

However, Bobby Wells is now offering free shipping for all orders over
$500. It is very unlikely that any one person has room for $500 worth
of fruit trees (> 20 trees), however it's not too late to try and
assemble a group order which would get us over that limit.

If anyone is interested in getting some fruit trees (grape vines,
blackberries, asparagus, etc. -- it's all here:
http://bobwellsnursery.com/ ), please contact me with specific details
of what you'd like to get. We're still in our first cycle with the
trees we planted last year, so I'm only going to be able to give very
incomplete information about what works well and what doesn't in the
neighborhood. We'll have much better information in about 9 months. If
we can get an order of $500 together, I will take care of getting the
plants. Note that the window of opportunity for planting dormant trees
this growing season is about 3 more weeks, at this point, so the order
would have to be placed in the next 7 days to allow for time to get them
into the ground.

Finally, if you're looking for a beautiful tree that can thrive with a
limited amount of elbow room and will almost certainly bear fruit for
many, many years, you can't go wrong with a pear tree. Check the online
article for a list of pear trees that will be disease-resistant in
Central Texas (hint: the pears you're probably used to buying in the
store will not do well around here due to soil-born diseases).

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