Before I get into the meat of my column this week, I just wanted to point out how fast time flies. As you look at the picture above from Tuesday’s paper, take a look at the dates, Friday came so quickly.

As I get older, time seems to be going by faster or maybe it is just that it takes me twice as long to do half as much. Whatever the case may be, it is never too early to plant for the future. I once heard a story about an old man, around seventy years of age, somewhere in the Middle East that was going to plant a tree in his yard. The tree he decided on was a Carob tree. His neighbor wondered why he was planting a tree that would take twenty years or more to produce fruit as he is seventy years old already. Why not go with something that would produce fruit quicker so that he would be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The old man smiled and said, “this tree is not for me, it is for my grandchildren to enjoy.” Being a grandfather myself, I find myself doing some similar things as well. 

When planting a garden you are producing food to be used in the short term. Even if you freeze or can your produce, it will generally be gone within twelve months. Gardening for today is easy to plan, you plant what you want to grow in your garden each year. Provided the deer, rabbits or woodchucks don’t get in, you can start harvesting crops as early as mid June and keep harvesting right up through mid October. You might even have some blueberry or raspberry bushes that you can pick fresh berries off of each season. But then there is planning for the future, like a 401K. Berry bushes and fruit trees are the best examples of planning for the future as it will take a few years before you get any crops and even more years before you get bountiful crops. We have a piece of property over in Briscoe that has been in the family since 1954. My grandparents purchased the property way back when and it has been handed down through the generations, and now to me. Long ago my grandparents had a huge garden over there and even a roadside farm stand to sell their surplus vegetables. The huge garden is long gone but there are still a long row of blueberry bushes and one apple tree my grandparents planted many years ago. 

The blueberry bushes still produce buckets of fruit each year, but the apple tree needs some work. With a lot of pruning, liming and fertilizing over the past five years the apple tree is starting to come back into good form. There were only a few apples last year, but that is a few better than the year before. I want to bring the apple tree back so that my grandchildren can go apple picking some day. I planted more apples and pears over there in recent years, again planning for the future. Sure, I will see some fruit in a couple of years myself, but most of the benefit will go to my kids and grand kids. Most of the common fruit trees like apple, pear, cherry and plums will start to produce fruit in as little as two years providing they were about five to six feet tall when planted. Peaches, apricots and nectarines will start in about four or five years from the time planted and paw paws should start to produce in about seven or eigth years from the time they get to six feet tall. Paw paws are usually sold only about two feet tall because they can be a slow grower when potted up. 

They do much better in the ground. Although I planted two paw paws last year and they are still about two feet tall, I think they might be my Carob tree. Nut trees can take much longer than even paw paws and they are the trees that you definitely plant for your grandchildren. In many cases you may have to wait ten to fifteen years before you see your first nut. And chances are a squirrel or chipmunk will see that nut a day before you were going to harvest it. I am amazed by how many nut trees we sell every year considering this fact. Although in all honesty the majority of these trees are being planted for deer and not for grandchildren. A word to the deer hunters out there, you can attract deer a lot faster by planting hostas and arborvitae, then by planting nut trees. I was looking at an online catalog for one of the nations largest online tree retailers and just had to laugh when I saw a chart that listed all the nut trees that they sell and how many years until harvest. One example is a butternut tree, that they say will produce nuts in two to three years, when in real life it takes about twenty years. My aunt has one that my grandmother planted way back in the day and it didn’t start producing nuts until it was about twenty-five feet tall. Maybe that is why we sell so many nut trees, people believe what they read on the internet.