Planted our Hat Trick Apple and Crimson Pointe Plum

I live in Jamestown North Dakota. We are plant hardiness zone 4a. My husband and I adore plants and love gardening. We are by no means experts at growing things and are therefore learning as we go. Today we planted a Hat Trick apple tree. I haven't come across much in the way of information on the internet about this tree so I guess we will have to see how it goes. What I do know about this tree is it grows 3 different types of apples on one tree. It grows Honey Crisp, Zestar, and Sweet 16. The tree is also self pollinating and is trained to grow up a wall. Here is a picture of my tree so you can see how they have shaped it.

Now as you can see we have chosen not to place it against a wall. I don't have the heart to force a tree into such an unnatural position and I also tend to feel guilty when I have to prune branches off of trees. (lol) So I try to do as little pruning as I can get away with. My husband thought training it would take a toll on his apple crop. As I stated previously we don't have expert experience in gardening and there is little info available about this tree so for all I know it could get out of control or revert or whatever else is possible, I don't know. Only time will tell and that's if it even survives our crazy weather here in Nd.

Today we also planted a Crimson Pointe Plum. It was the tallest tree left in the nursery and it just seems so pretty. We moved to this particular home in February of 2010. It had no landscaping of any kind and the yard is so plain and gets so hot without any shade so we've been adding trees and bushes and flowerbeds. Although this ornamental plum tree is nice and tall it grows straight up and doesn't bush out. I'm looking forward to see how it does over the years. The strange part of this particular tree is it looks like it has thorns on its trunk. It may just be branches that have broken of  but its odd that they are so sharply pointed.