Winter is finally upon us, with freezing temps and a fairly substantial (for here) first snow. Above is the mandarin, which lived through its first winter, and which, with the appropriate babying, will hopefully live through its second.

Spent the day pruning and puttering in the garden, and dug up and transplanted into the food forest a robust, young cherry tree. There’s a mature cherry tree on the property, and this is one of its children, either a sucker or from seed – I’m not sure which. In any case, I’ve been training it and another for a few years, and this one has developed a nice low v-shaped scaffolding. I dug it up and moved it to one of the new food forest plots, where it will occupy the low tree layer, along with a plum, a hackberry, and a few figs.

The other cherry – also a child of the big tree – produced fruit this past spring for the first time. Not much, but enough for me to hope and believe that it will continue to. I may eventually move that one as well, though it’s not in a bad spot, and I’ve been using it to hone my pruning technique over the years. Both trees produce lots of root suckers, so they’re ideal for the food forest, where some day they’ll ideally produce cherry thickets.

After I transplanted the tree, I dug up one of these root suckers and potted it up in the nursery – it’s the tall one in the foreground.  If I can get ahold of some scion wood, I’ll stick it onto one of these rootstocks (assuming it roots and lives), and I may pot up a few more for bonsai.