Another Flowering Pear Planted - Spring 2018

For Earth Day last year, we planted a tree:  our Dawn Redwood.  This was while our #newoldfarmhouse was being built, but we still had access to the backyard. 

This year, we planted a couple of trees on Earth Day.  This post chronicles the first one:  a Chanticleer Cleveland Select Flowering Pear tree.  I took the kids to Home Depot on Earth Day and had each of them pick out a small tree.  They were running a sale on tiny trees like the one you see above for $15 each.  This is the one that the Bird picked out and that's here in the photo showing off her new tree after she helped me plant it.  We put it on the south fence line in an open spot. 

This was a nice Earth Day activity for me and the kids.  The Bird was so excited to help plant the tree.  She's my gardening buddy, so she knows how to get plants (and trees) out of their pots by beating on the pots and then she also helps rough up the roots to help them get started.  She's also in charge of helping amend the soil that we put in the hole.  She dumps in some perlite and some peat moss and some compost from our tumbler.  Then takes her little shovel and mixes it all up.  Does it take longer than if I was doing it myself?  Oh...for sure.  But while the other kids get a little bored and move on quickly, the Bird hangs right in there.  Asking questions.  Making observations.  And generally enjoying the process. 

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while know that I love me some Cleveland Pears.  I know they're not awesome trees because they don't live super long, but they grow fast are beautiful for a couple of weeks in the Spring and grow pretty narrow so they play well with others.  Here's a photo from all the way back in 2010 that shows our first Cleveland Pear tree planted in our front yard of our very first house.  Since then, I ended up planting four others at that house.  And then we put in two in our new house in Downers Grove.  One in the front yard.  One in the back. 

This particular $15 version is quite small.  You can see it barely gets over our four-foot-tall fence.  And that's ok for now.  It will shoot up and I'll 'limb it up' to get the growth focused near the top. 

This marks the tenth tree we've added to our property since we bought it back in 2016.  The last one was in July of last year when we planted this King Crimson Maple in the far back corner of our backyard. 

The tag from Home Depot for the Pyrus calleryana.

In terms of the ten trees we've planted, I've documented most of them here on the blog so far. 

There's the two earlier-planted flowering pears, 1 Japanese flowering cherry, 2 Lindens, 1 Dawn Redwood, 1 Saucer Magnolia, a Corkscrew Willow, 1 Crimson King Norway Maple and now this Cleveland Select Chanticleer Flowering Pear.   As I mentioned earlier...each of the kids picked out an Earth Day tree, so as you might guess, this list of ten is going to grow.  More posts to come on each of those trees (and...actually...a few more!) in the coming days.