You could probably say that we are gluttons for punishment. After all that work digging, hauling, storing and transplanting our cider apple trees, why in the world would we want to do it all over again — especially now that we’ve got our 12 acres of orchard trees in place and ready to go?

Answer: we’ve got 60 acres of ground we’re hoping to fill with cider apple trees (and eventually perry pears, too!). Given the high-density planting scheme we’ve selected, where our trees are on a 3-foot by 12-foot spacing, it takes about 1,200 trees just to fill one acre. That means we’re going to need 60 (acres) x 1,200 (trees/acre) to fill up this farm land completely, or a total of something like 72,200 trees. The 14,000 trees we’ve already got a just a drop in the bucket!

Here go the next 27,000 nursery trees!