A very long-in-the-tooth and long-in-the-making story–it basically can be summed up with the sentence “We have a handful of new trees.”
It started back in August of 2018 at the Tractor Supply down in Gilroy with an advert for pepper trees. I took a pic of the advert, and 18 months later called the number and we headed down one weekend to take a look.
Turns out the advertiser lived on a small property in Hollister and was preparing to move to Arizona, and needed to sell off all their stock. He also liked to name his larger trees after Flintstone characters. We ended up coming back with two trees: Fred and Betty.
We also signed up to return for a few more, including Dino.
Happy to say almost all of the trees are doing well now that they are planted. We also learned a valuable lesson–plant early and not rely on manual watering when they were still in their boxes.
The trees, now that they are planted, are flourishing again. They’re the things that look like shrubs but are actually over 6′ tall in the pic below. We learned a lot of lessons from this project: namely I’m the better judge when it comes to digging holes of the appropriate size. That skill will come in handy as I soon have a couple of volunteer gum trees that will need to be moved.
