Planting an Apple Hedge (Right in the Middle of Our Garden!)

Growing apples in the South isn't as easy as it is up north... unless you have good varieties! So far, the Shell apple is the best one we've found for Lower Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Today we plant 15 of them in an intensive apple orchard row, right in our Grocery Row Gardens. Come meet us at the Farmhouse Fair in Milton on March 22nd - we'll have lots of plants, including a few Shell apples: https://thefarmhousefair.com/ Get velvet beans and other seeds at the Good Gardens nursery: https://www.etsy.com/shop/GoodGardens Join the GROW500 Challenge (and also get my food forest course!): https://www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener Intensive apple orchard culture is common commercially, but you almost never see it in a backyard. Yet now that we have a good southern apple variety, we are giving it a try. We planted apples at 3' apart and ran two wires to support them. Ultra-dwarf apple rootstocks fruit very fast but are weak-rooted, and need support to avoid being blown over. We should be harvesting apples next year if this experiment works out! Growing apples in Florida and growing apples in Alabama seems hard, but it's not as bad as you think. We are testing over ten varieties right now to see what does well, and we already have some that are quite happy and healthy despite the heat, the bugs, the disease and the low chill hours we face in the South.