Silly old me kind of went fruit tree crazy when I moved here and saw all this open space. I had brought some young trees with me from my previous home, as they were small enough to still dig up like the ultra-dwarf peach and nectarine, some apples, a plum or two, a boysenberry and a guava. Those all went into the ground first thing. Well, I got a little greedy and started planting a bunch more…. I have about 3 different areas of fruit trees here on these almost 6 acres and berries, and various other fruits.
I’ve lost a few to weather situations, random neighbor cows, and just poor luck. All the ones I dug up and brought with me survived though. A few just never came out of dormancy that I had bought bare root. Apparently, it’s the thing now to trim off basically all the roots on bare root trees, which I think is rather nuts. They used to come with roots, and I never had a failure to live with any of those ones. Anyone know why they have changed how they do this now? It isn’t just one company doing this. I have ordered from a few different companies and bought locally as well and none of them are coming with any roots really.
I haven’t counted how many trees I now have. I probably should. I guess it’s like keeping chickens. They just keep appearing. Instead of chicken math, it’s tree math. I love trees anyway, and fruiting ones are even better IMHO. Yeah, I have no idea what I will be doing with all the fruit when they really start producing.
Well, it is that time of year when the leaves have fallen off, it’s kind of chilly out and the experts say it’s time to prune for growth. Winter pruning creates more growth in the next year. It’s also a good time to really get in there and shape and direct that growth. It’s when you cut off bigger branches that will eventually cause issues as well as thinning out spindly growth and the centers. I like my trees to have the sun filtering down into the centers to help ripen all the fruits and to promote airflow to restrict diseases and fungi. An old gardener once told me the branches should be spaced enough apart that a bird can easily fly through without hitting anything, so I keep that in mind.
I don’t have much of a technique really. If you open up a book about fruit trees, there are some handy diagrams and tips and rules that sound all very official. I’m not one to snub any kind of good wisdom and know-how. But I also just kind of look at the tree itself and see what it wants. I don’t try to be too ridged in trying to follow the rules because the truth is, some trees are just weird. They are going to grow in unexpected ways and no matter what you won’t be able to make it look perfect. So, I mainly focus on the most important things.
Height. I’m a shorty with a ladder problem. I don’t want to be risking my clumsy neck on a ladder at all. I prefer to keep my trees on the low side, where I can pick with a fruit pole if I need to at most. Anything taller than that the crows are welcome to. I can’t have branches too low however, or the turkey, ducks, geese, etc., will get the idea that they can pick their own fruits whenever. I may end up fencing them all out during harvest season anyway but still…. they don’t always wait until something is ripe before making a meal of things.
Dead Stuff. Or diseased stuff. Snip that all right out. The tree doesn’t need it and it just gets in the way of things.
The Center. However you like your trees trained, go with that. But I like an open center for the most part, so I clear out the spindly stuff that tends to grow inward. I think that is done anyway with central leader trees too.
Shape. The best way to shape the tree is to make sure when you make a cut you make sure it’s directly above a bud that is pointing where you want the new growth to go. Try to make the tree as symmetrical as you can. But I have a few weirdo trees that are young and dumb and just aren’t all that shapable yet.
Now berries are a whole other issue. Berries can be assholes. Especially vining prickly ones. And there are many different types and growth patterns depending on the type of berry you are growing. So, I will only mention them as I do them. I did a couple boysenberry bushes today. Boysenberries are Jerks. Maybe not as bad as Himalayan blackberries can be, but they rank pretty high up on the aggravation scale. Mainly because they grow like monsters and are rebels. They don’t care about your plans for a nice tidy berry patch at all. They are going to do what they are going to do, and they don’t care if it hurts your feelings.
I have a t-post and wire trellis for these guys that they basically just laugh at during the growing season. I try to keep a few branches tied up. The ones that are going to be fruiting. These ones fruit on canes that are a year old. The canes that fruit die after and what feels like 1000 young new canes shoot up during the growing season. This is the time of year I try to get in there with leather gloves on to try to tame them. I cut out canes that fruited, they are brown and dead so are easy to identify. I cut out spindly vines. I try to save about 6 nice thick healthy new vines and prune out all the rest. Those six vines I attach with yarn scraps or string to the trellis, 3 on each side, 2 on each level of the wires. I shorten any that are too long. I do this with each bush. Today, I did 2 of them. It took me a while because I am hobbling but it needed to be done. Sometimes you find a vine has rooted at the tips. That’s what they do, how they spread and make more. Pull those up if you don’t want them. Pot them up and curse your enemies with a “gift” of a boysenberry plant or make your friendly masochistic gardeners happy with them.
After I finished with those boysenberries, and I did pot up one baby, I fed some of the trimmings to the goats and put the rest in the burn pile. I moved on to my fruit trees. I noticed that my pineapple guava which doesn’t shed its leaves, has what looks like a black mold on many of its leaves. Anyone know how to deal with this? I will have to do some research. I can’t imagine that is good for the plant. It doesn’t need any pruning, so I started on the cherry trees in this first fruit tree area. Most were easy and didn’t need any pruning yet. The sour cherry went kind of crazy with small twiggy growth and so I went to town on it, clearing out that center and removing a couple branches that were too close and angled sharply (an issue that can lead to big branches breaking later on if not handled when young). It looked much tamer after it’s trim. Most of the peaches and nectarines only needed a bit of shaping but there really is not making them look good at this point as they were victims of cows so I’m just happy they have a few branches at all, no matter how lopsided or misshapen they are now. My hope is that the new owners of those cows and that property will do a better job at keeping them home and that these trees can maybe recover. A few I know are just root stock trees now, thanks cows, but I’m not giving up on them. I can practice grafting onto them. My replacement honeycrisp apple (the other one was destroyed by cows, sigh) is small and spindly yet so needed no pruning. Then I got to the plums. The plums have been here longer than most of the young trees. They are now needing more direction in the winter, so I did a good bit of pruning on them. Plums will go crazy. I hope I get some fruit this year. I love plums. They are my favorite tree fruits after apples and pears. I only got as far as a couple of the plums before it began to rain, and my foot was basically killing me at that point. Normally the rain wouldn’t matter, and I would get this done but the pain just leaches all my will power. It’s hard enough just to get out and do it as it is right now. This job, these group of trees anyway, would take me maybe an hour at most if I was uninjured. It took me 2 hours just to get up to the plums which is about halfway in this 1st orchard. I figure I will just have to do as much as I can stand to do every day for a while. I won’t be able to do it after the surgery so it must be done this month.
Oh, and a word about feeding tree pruning to your goats and rabbits. Some are perfectly safe for them to chew on. Apples and berry vines. But others you must be cautious of. I have been reading that anything with a pit fruit- like cherries, contains chemicals that can build up and be toxic to your goats. That goes for the leaves, wilted leaves especially. So as a precaution I do not feed those branches to my goats or rabbits and stick with what I know is 100% safe for them like apple branches. The trimmings that I don’t want to use for other things gets carted to the fire pit where I only burn plant matter and wood. The ashes are then added to the garden.
The Witch Trees 