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Building the Orchard

  • Anuja Lath
  • AURA
  • March 4, 2010
  • (0)

While planning the orchard, we decided we wanted a nice big one, with hundreds of fruit trees, with our creative workshop studio overlooking it. We planted some trees in 2007, but most of them died during the harsh winter that year. We planted more the next year and put on some protective gear on them in 2008, and thankfully most of them survived.

Last year we thought the entire patch of the orchard (roughly an acre) was too large and needed some walkways within it for us to be able to stroll through it at leisure.Copy of IMG_0632

We decided to create some sort of meandering paths and amoeba type shapes within the orchard, with larger trees towards the center of these amoeba and shorter ones on the periphery of each. I also though little patches of ground cover in the middle of these paths would look nice in the long run, but we need more time before we decide they look cute. Irrigation pipes are already laid out in this area, and when they’re turned on this area is quite a sight. It looks glorious!

 

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This is a Feb 2010 picture. We had roughly 75 varieties of flower seeds, and we planted them all in the empty spaces in the amoeba shapes. This is apart from the 170 odd fruit trees planted here (which you can’t really see). We have just about everything that possibly grows in this region. I got someone in office to help me catalog all the fruit trees and make plastic laminated tags for them. Will also remember to add that list to this section. We should get fruit in some of them this year, and hopefully in abundance in the coming years. I did see some mulberries peeking out the other day, I hope they happen this year. Atul knows how to make mulberry Jam :-)

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The idea behind planting all 75 varieties of flowers was to also catalog them this year and do some skilled, thoughtful plantation of flowers next year. Atul created the most detailed excel sheet for cataloging this information, and passed it on to me to fill in. I was horrified! I’m supposed to take pictures of each type of flower, note down just about every characteristic of the plant, e.g. size, shape, color, span, scent, height, planting season and a million other things I can’t even remember now. Am planning to delete most columns and grab the basics…lol. That itself seems like a daunting task currently.

 

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This is a more recent picture, and I plan to grab a full view of the orchard mostly from this angle going forward. It should look completely different next year this time. Can hardly wait! Oh, you can see how the workshop windows look out on to the entire orchard. Should help get the creative juices flowing!

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