It takes a village to plant a lot of trees

When we bought what would become Birch Star Farm, our first thought was to plant a ton of fruit and Christmas trees to use as a mainly passive source of income. Dig a few holes, plant the trees, give ‘em some water, and boom - a few fields full of profit. How hard could it be?

Despite being somewhat seasoned parents of two kids, we overlooked that a five year old and a five month old do actually require some supervision when both mom and dad will be outside in the hot sun for 7 straight hours struggling to get nearly 500 trees in the ground before they dry up and die.

Thank god for family. Over the course of two weekends, we had one very enthusiastic Nana in charge of the littles while two aunts and an uncle rolled up their sleeves to help us get 100 fruit trees and close to 500 saplings (so small that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for someone’s mature tree trimmings) into the ground.

It’s backbreaking (especially for those of us on the other side of 40), but boy is it rewarding.

We’ve got:

• Spanish, French, English and American heritage apples

• Pear, sour cherry, cold-hearty peaches, and plum trees, and

• Balsam fir, Douglas fir and Scotch pine Christmas trees

all mostly thriving and shooting up new growth week over week for us to admire.

Sure, we’re still having to water them with a combination of 300 foot of garden hose and Home Depot buckets, but with the man- and woman-power of enthusiastic and shovel-bearing family, we didn’t lose any to neglect or running out of time. We truly couldn’t do it without them.