Frost is here - and 2 more trees in the home orchard

Well, there was a preliminary light frost a couple days ago, but today I looked out the window to see the inevitable REAL frost. Everything was slightly whitish... beautiful yet deadly :(

On Sunday, I wanted to go to Home depot. The trees/shrubs were on clearance at 50% off.
Heeeey now, I can build my mini orchard for Half the price! LOL.
We ended up going to a home depot in Vernon hills off of Milwaukee and 60/town line road.
The kids found the trees, and they all looked pretty scraggly. It wasn't only because it was the end of the season. The stores around here buy trees in the spring, and again in the fall. Those are the times you're supposed to plant. I asked the kids to help me look for nice looking trees, with fruit that they'd eat... and surprisingly, we found some REALLY nice looking trees and took them home.

Benefits of planting in Spring:
Warm Weather
Instant gratification
easier to tell if the tree is dead/alive so you can get a refund for it

Benefits of planting in Fall:
Roots grow during the winter, so growth is greater in Spring
Dormancy leads to less transplant shock
more productive tree, because of the larger roots

I like buying trees from Home Depot. Not only, because of the sales... the garden club gave out coupons via email that had "buy 1 tree, get 1 free", but because they carry dwarf/semi dwarf trees, AND they allow you to return it a year later no matter what the reason as long as you have your receipt.

I had to return a peach tree that was plain out dead on arrival, but I just thought it was dormant :( and I am contemplating returning the bartlett pear tree for a Semi-dwarf bartlett tree. I do, after all, only have a 10th of an acre to work with.

On Sunday, I picked up a Montmorency Tart cherry
http://www.arborday.org/treeguide/TreeDetail.cfm?id=95

and an Elberta peach
http://www.arborday.org/treeguide/TreeDetail.cfm?id=72

It was $10 each tree, so I can only hope that maybe next year I'll get $10 of fruit. The first year of fruits are supposed to be cut off, so the tree can concentrate on growth, but I don't see the fun in that. In Nature, they'd have fruited, and I leave it at that. let the kids pick the fruits and love the tree that gave it to them.

(I highly recommend people to read instructions even if you don't follow them. Then you'll know what you did wrong if things go awry. )

With the winter approaching, some of my posts from Edible Landscaping will cross with Urban Homesteading, because they are very intertwined with eachother.