Bees and fruit trees
Feb 3rd, 2009 by Amy
After learning about bees in last week’s Master Gardener class, I was inspired to create a home for mason bees. We are considering keeping honey bees as well, but that takes a bit more of a commitment than putting up a little house on an east wall.
Part of the motivation for the bees is our plan to put in 8 additional fruit trees this spring. We are hoping to put in plums, cherries, apples, and pears. We plan to buy our trees from a small local nursery called Earth’s Rising Nursery. They are a small outfit in Monroe, OR growing organic fruit trees. They don’t have a website and only publish a little black and white catalog. The best way to get their catalog is to call them at 541-847-5950. We learned about them from friends that purchased apple trees from them a few years ago. They carry modern varieties like Jonagold and Fuji apples, but also some heirloom apples like Cox Orange Pippin, Winesap, Ashmead’s Kernal. They carry the largest variety of apples, which only makes sense because apples have the largest number of known varieties at over 1,500.
We narrowed our selection down somewhat, but I was feeling a little overwhelmed with the number of considerations like pollination, disease resistance, and desirable traits (good for cider, freestone, good keeper, etc). To help in the decision process, I decided to call the folks at Earth’s Rising and was treated to a wonderful conversation with Delbert McCombs. I asked him countless questions about pollination (which he convinced me not to worry about for apples, pears, and plums with a home orchard), heirlooms, etc . He offered great suggestions which we will incorporate in our tree purchase. He told me about a prized English cider apple called Golden Russet that isn’t even in his brochure, and he also steered me toward the Shannon pear which was a variety passed to him by an orchardist years ago. He is not sure that it is properly identified since he took it to the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, which holds the genetic information for all known pear species in the US, and they weren’t able to identify it. What sealed the deal for me was when he said that he still gets calls from people that used to buy Shannon pears from the orchardist in addition to helping preserve an heirloom pear variety. My conversation reminded me how rewarding it can be to connect with others that make our local lifestyle possible.
OMG that is SO freakin cool! I love bees. And am very worried about their demise. Makes me feel better to know you’re helping keep them around and healthy!
It seems like bees are the “thing” this year - I’ve been reading about more and more people taking up bee keeping. I am allergic to bees, but I do love to support my local bee keepers by buying lots of delicious honey - especially with the baking obsession I’ve had of late….
Hearing how much trouble bees are in saddens me. I wish more people were conscious of their role and how to care for them, as you’ve been doing
Dena - Bees are really cool and we all should be as worried as you are about their demise. Its actually really easy to provide mason bees a home. They sell homes and the cardboard tubes at Down To Earth - you just have to put it on east wall and clean it out by replacing the old tubes every year.
Mangochild - Keep buying locally & sustainably raised honey! I can’t believe how irresponsible some commercial honey farms are.
[...] garden plans are making some progress as well. We have the order ready for our fruit trees and I just placed a seed order from Seed Savers Exchange tonight. I have some peas leftover from [...]
[...] from Raintree and the rest were purchased from Earth’s Rising Farm (no website, see this post for contact info). Here is a list of our fruit trees planted (or soon to be) on our 1/3 acre [...]