Bareroot

I love bare root season  It's January, the slowest time of the year at the garden center.   It's cold & gray, but now in the back beds of the nursery are hundreds of young, bare fruit trees heeled in, in tidy, alphabetical lines with all the promise & romance of orchards of flower in the spring, & harvests of fruit in the summer.  There is something encouraging  & optimistic about all this...& a sense of the miraculous.  Just now, it seems almost impossible that in a few months time there will be a luxury of colour.
 Living on the edges of the remains of a hydraulic mine, there really is NO soil.  The house & yard sit on remains of ancient, exposed river bed. I have pots on the deck, pots in the yard, raised beds in the back for vegetables & a couple of mounds with a couple of small trees.  We have one peach already. I reckon it's a Fey Elberta.  We get a good crop maybe every other year.  It all depends of the weather.  Last spring was cold & stormy, yet we had just enough sun for the peach to flower extravagantly & time enough for pollination.  Then just as the fruit was beginning to form a series of hail storms in late May & early June knocked the crop down.  This year I'm putting a miniature peach in a pot, reasoning that if & when hail, freezing rain, or sudden downpours of small fish occur I can dash out & cover it.  Assuming I'm not at work.  Anyway I'm planting my little peach in a huge, bright orange glazed pot which when it flowers will be instant fiesta!