Digging up and Moving an Apple Tree

I love that our yard is has some established fruit trees and berries. It's definitely one of the things we were looking for in property. Unfortunately that meant not getting to choose where the previous owners had planted those things. Most of it is fine, but for some reason there was a young semi-dwarf Pink Lady apple tree purposely planted in the middle of a garden bed full of golden raspberries. I thought that was pretty odd, but wasn't sure at the time whether we'd want to keep it there or move it. 

Here is a photo of that bed area from mid-summer. In the bed on the right you can kind of see the apple tree in with all the raspberries - it's the tall thing in the middle. 

Now that fall is here, it was time to make that decision. The younger a fruit tree is, the easier it is to transplant, and fall is the time to do it because they are entering dormancy. After brief deliberation, we decided to go ahead and move it nearby to the space between the the two garden beds, which we briefly used for tossing weeds during our first weekend of yard clean up. Most of those weeds had deteriorated nicely into compost soil, some of which I shoveled into the nearby beds.

Here's that area once I'd cleaned it out.

I found something strange when I was cleaning out this space: tile. There were almost a dozen pieces of tile laying between the beds, covered by dirt and grass and then the weed compost pile. Someone's attempt at preventing weeds or??? Not sure. But I used all of them to cover the compost which covered the weeds in the raspberry bed, trying to smother them out.

I also found two old stumps and root balls back in this area, nearer to the fence. Roots are so much easier to dig out when they've been dead for a very long time! This big thing was hardly any work.

Here's the Pink Lady in the raspberry bed pre-move:

And here it is in it's new location:

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I tilled this whole area down as far as I could go before digging the hole. Easily dug up the tree since it's still young and the roots aren't too large, and moved it over. I mixed in some of the soil from it's original planting with the new stuff, staked it to keep it straight, and watered. Now to see how well it handles the winter and then grows in the spring.

I'm really happy we decided to move it. It has it's own space now and will be easier to access for picking/pruning. This was a fun project, and because it was really nice for the past few days, it was a great break from doing things in the house.