Around this time last year I purchased and made arrangements to have a half-dozen large trees delivered and planted at the ranch. I went to Tractor Supply to buy a couple rolls of no-climb fencing so that we could have a crew re-fence 900+ feet of our eastern border, and on my way back I stopped at the Moon Valley Nursery, which you can see east of 101 outside Gilroy. Soon enough I had picked out 3 Coastal Oaks, a California Strawberry, a Mission Fig and, since it was buy-2-get-1-free, I went for a pretty Jacaranda.
About a month later, a truck and crew showed up and we got busy planting. And by we, I mean we–apparently when a crew arrives to plant a tree, most of the time they do the digging AND planting entirely by hand. Sure, they use shovels and a large dolly, but they just rocked up with six trees in 4′ boxes, and many of the trees were not going to be planted near a paved surface. Thankfully we have an assortment of heavy machinery, so I climbed into Bambi and dug 5 holes. We’ll get to why only 5 holes when 6 trees had arrived…
After the holes were dug, I slapped the forks on Giggles and helped unload the trees and move them to their holes. All my heavy lifting sped the process up considerably. The crew said if I hadn’t been so helpful, it would have easily taken them the entire day and part of the next to get everything planted.
The sixth tree, the Jacaranda, was originally going to go…you know, I forget where it was going to be planted, because a few weeks before the trees arrived, we discovered that the mulberry tree outside the door to the garden shed was very wobbly (see vid at left).
So remove it we did. The crew then dug the hole by hand, and while I could get the new tree around the back of the garage to the sports court, the team had to use their dolly to move the last few feet.
By mid-afternoon all the trees were planted. The crew even built a wee cage around the new fig tree, planted near the remains of the ancient one that predated the house and died because the previous owners poured concrete down its cavities. The crew used some spare fencing mesh and stakes I pulled from the barn.
The trees were planted in May and we had a watering schedule to maintain. Thankfully I have the old tank with attached pump, left in the barn by the previous owners, so it was easy to put the tank in the mini truck, fill it up from the hose in the courtyard, and drive out to the trees and provide them with water. We did this every day for the first week and then three days a week the entire summer. And I’m not using the royal “we,” as Agent B was primarily responsible for doing the watering.
Then tragedy struck–a massive heatwave hit the Bay Area in July and four of our new trees died in a week. We know it wasn’t a lack of water as the fig tree survived, as did a volunteer Casuarina which we pulled out of a bathtub in the north garden and replanted by the barn owl box. We lost the California Strawberry and the three oak trees. BUT I had purchased insurance/warranties on them, so replacements arrived this past November and were planted. Again we did the watering routine until the rains came, after which we paused on that. Here are pics of all the new trees and the new new ones. We’ll resume watering once the weather warms up.
