Barrow Road Orchard Planting

This garden is one that we work in on a weekly basis, as a company we have been here since it's inception two years ago. There have been lots of plants plated since then and a fantastic ornamental lawn as well as some wild flower turf. It's in this wild flower turf that we planted the Malus & Prunus trees.

The trees were delivered to site wrapped in plastic for their protection.

Trees wrapped in plastic on site

Trees and canes

We then placed the trees to where they were going to be planted, there is already up light installed into the turf which gave us a good idea of the locations, this turned out not to be completely accurate, as we will find out later. We then placed a string line down and put some canes in the ground to get a more accurate location for each tree.

Canes, string and light in the ground

Looking along the string line

String line attached to first cane

As most of the trees have will be lit up by the lights, we have to cut a circle in the turf to include the light, we did this and measured it out on to a desperate piece of string that was tied to the canes, my colleague moved the marked string around the cane as i followed with the half moon turf cutter, this cut a nice neat hole ready for the trees to be planted in.

Cutting the turf by following the marked string line

Care was always taken to not interfere with the electrical cables running to the lights

Once we had cut all the holes, we realised that three of the lights were not in the correct location and that we had to move the lights and the holes forward slightly. We made sure that the power was off, then we pulled the light up, the fairly easily removable. we then re-measured the turf holes and found that we could get away with only cutting the front half of the circles and placing that into the rear half of the existing circle. This is wild flower turf, so the marks made by the cutting will not be visible in a few weeks once it starts to grow.

New cut line visible

Light ready to be reinstated

Once the lights were placed into the correct position, we then planted each tree, always stepping back to make sure of exact alignment, this is crucial as these can be seen from the house, so any misalignments will be noticed.

Next we hammered the large stakes next to each tree and tied them, using hessian banding to the trees, this will give each tree a good start in life and help them grow upright, protecting them from bad weather events.

All trees planted

The orchard finished and tidied up

All waste was removed from site and disposed of in a suitable manner.