Winter Pruning, day 1

With the weather turning cold for the next week or so, we are taking advantage of it to get our winter pruning done. We started with the orchard trees we planted in 2023. Last year we pruned them in February, But did not get around to summer pruning them, which, as it turned out, was a bad call as you shall see.

We start with the Freakin’ Rogue cider apple.

That’s French for “Freakin’ Rogue” and as you can see, it’s gone a bit rogue with tons of long, whippy upright shoots. We cut out most of these.

We will return to this later in the day to try to discipline some of the sky seeking.

Then the Newton Pippin. This one grew a double leader, one of which should have been pruned this summer. A double leader creates a fork in the tree which can split if loaded too heavily with fruit or ice.

Like so. See the split in the fork above?

Next the dolgo crabapple. This one grew too top heavy over the summer, and the trunk, being young and green, bent over in the direction of the prevailing winds, and a second lateral turned into a new leader.

Even though I hate doing it to a 4-year-old tree, I couldn’t see any other alternative. We took it back to a single straight whip.

Best of luck, Dolgo. May you have better care taken of you this summer.

I forgot to take a “before” of the Van Deman quince. We are discovering that the quince, like the pears, tend to grow with a more upright habit, and a profusion of whippy shoots.

We cleaned out the inside of the tree pretty aggressively but left it’s basic three limbed vase shape intact. I notice a lot of the heritage trees in the area were structured like this, a single trunk going up 3-4 feet, then 3-4 main branches extending equally out from there and no central leader. There is probably a reason that the orchard industry has moved away from that (if, in fact, it was ever a style and not just shear neglect) but I see a lot of those old trees still bearing fruit 50 or more years later so they must have gotten something right. At any rate, I didn’t have the guts to remodel this tree.

This is our Wolf River, which we almost lost to rabbits within the first few weeks of planting it. Uncle Adam saved it with a bridge graft, and it has done splendidly since then.

We took off the two lower branches and shortened the top a little, hopefully to encourage a first scaffold at about Seppi’s head height (3 feet) and then a second scaffold at about 5 feet.

Another quince. Again, note the upright branches in close proximity, and thick growth of shoots.

We trimmed out any inward growing shoots, and moderately pruned the main laterals, but left its basic structure with main leader growing up through the center and three main scaffold limbs extending upward more vertically than I would care for in an apple.

We had to take a break for errands, lunch, vomiting children, and prosciutto, but we came back to it before sunset.

This T. E. Perry pear also got too top heavy for its trunk and began to sag. Uncle Adam staked it to keep it from falling over, which kept it somewhat upright, but gave it a very… distinctive… scoliosis in the mid-trunk.

There was a large number of laterals to choose from, so we isolated two scaffolds.

Both a little shorter than I would like. We will see how it grows over the summer, and maybe the bottom scaffold will be removed, the second scaffold will become the bottom, and we will shape a new top scaffold.

What can I say? I don’t like to have to bend over or crawl under branches to pick apples. Or pears. Or Quince.

The last pear tree (sorry, I don’t remember the variety off the top of my head) is a typical young pear, from what we have seen. It likes to shoot for the sky with a lot of thin, whippy laterals that all vie with the leader for apical dominance.

This tree, however, has a funny little 5-way knot of branches coming off in five different directions, and leader shooting straight up, all from the same level about 3 1/2 feet up. We cleared the trunk from there to the ground.

And moderately pruned all the laterals and the leader.

I decided to tie the laterals down to encourage them to become a stronger supporting scaffold. While we were waiting for Evie to get some bale twines, we took a look at the Walnuts.

Yep, it’s a Walnut.

And a bigger walnut.

The final result with the pear. It looks funny, but hopefully it will give us a nice structure to start bearing fruit next year.

We re-visited the Freakin’ Rogue and did the same thing, moderately pruning them back. We will pinch blossoms again this year. Next year, the trees should be five years old. We will see how their forms are looking. The Dolgo and the Wolf River will most likely need another year, especially the Wolf River which is known to produce enormous heavy apples, before the branches are strong enough to support a real crop.