I have always wanted an orchard.  A lovely place to sit under the flowering trees on a late spring day and read a great book.  Guess what?  I don’t have an orchard, but I have something close.  A friend with lots of land!!!  And guess what? She wants an orchard too!!!  How exceptionally cool is that?

(Here is Tiff, my orchard wanting buddy from www.mycrowdedkitchen.com, sorting through the trees at Costco.)

In honor of this grand plan, we made a shopping date to go to Costco because Costco has had the most amazing deal on fruit trees I have seen in a while.  And we purchased several of these wonderful trees to supplement the few fruit trees she already has.  And then we purchased several more for the church garden, because I can get my orchard fix that way too and the food bank always needs fresh fruit.  This was in addition to the couple of trees I bought for my own space earlier the same week.  I don’t really have the room, but the fruit trees were $11.50 to $14.50 and they were beautiful.

I have bought trees before by mail order.  Guess what came?  A stick.  Actually, a short stick.  The instructions were to plant the stick with the scraggly root-like things pointed down and wait to see if it grows.  Some of my sticks made it.  Some of my sticks died.  One of my sticks which was supposed to turn into a dwarf peach tree actually turned into a little bushy thing.  Who knows what it really is.  The trees at Costco were not sticks.  They were as tall as me and many of them already had buds.  Plus, it’s Costco.  They have the best warranty ever.  Of any store.  So the point of this rambling is that Costco has sold a lot of trees to my friends and I this season.  We took Tiff’s (my orchard wanting buddy) suburban with the seats removed.  We were women on a mission.

We ended up with 14 trees in all for both projects, which took two carts with them all standing up side by side in the basket.  It looked like we were pushing around small forests.  They made great camouflage, but we did get funny looks from lots of fellow Costco members.

We got all fourteen in the suburban and still had room for extra groceries, because who can leave Costco without buying at least a couple of Godzilla size bags of chips or enough fruit snacks for an entire elementary school?

I am pretty sure we were the only women in the parking lot stuffing 14, 5 ft. trees into their vehicle.  We also had that lovely moment when you start laughing so hard you think you are going to pee your pants.  People were definitely looking at us funny as we were doubled over in hysterics shoving one tree after another into her bottomless pit of a vehicle.  But it was all good.  Because now Tiff is going to have her orchard and the church garden gets to have a mini one too!  Awesome?  I think so.