It is that time of year again. Spring is intermittently springing. It is February. Time to prune our trees for Summer.
We started with Raspberries. Those should have been pruned in the fall, before the leaves dropped, when we could still have figured out which canes had fruited and which had not. We did the best we could.
Seppi and Winnie are willing, if not particularly detail oriented helpers.
If you give them a solid visual cue, they will cut down everything that meets that cue. They may cut down a few other things as well. We’ll see in the summer how they did.
First tree up is the little Comice pear. This one has a good first level scaffold, and this year we are pruning it lightly to encourage thickening of the branches, but not much spreading. We are really focusing on the second layer scaffold.
The Theilersbirne pear has a lot more attitude. This is really just a matter of taking back the secondary shoots, and leaving what we want to grow this year.
The Havran quince is large, with a lot of suckers. We mostly just trimmed the suckers away to clear out the center of the tree. This will be a yearly maintenance task from here on out.
The Van Deman quince was beaten up pretty bad last year. It lost a few branches because it couldn’t handle the fruit load. We will have to be a lot more cautious this year, and thin the fruit after first fruit set. We want it to stress the branches to encourage adaptation, but not break them off.
The Wolf River is more than tall enough. We don’t want the apple trees to get above 8 feet tall, so that we will be able to pick them without a ladder when we are old. This one has a funky southward bend mid trunk, so…
We left a couple of laterals pointing north to see if they will help balance it out. It is no big deal in any event (we hope). The canopy leaning to the south just opens the inside up to more sunlight, so it will be fine.
The Dolgo crabapple, before. We forgot to take a picture after pruning, but basically we just cleaned all the laterals off the main branches and pruned the mains a bit to encourage stronger growth this year.
The Newtown Pippin is looking good. I really like the structure. It is as tall as we want it to get, and we will encourage some moderate fruit set this year.
The Frequin Rouge! That guy is just crazy, sending up shoots every 4 or 5 inches on all its branches.
We took those all back, but left the main structure intact as it looks pretty good to us.
We only spent about an hour on pruning, and then took off, because the weather was nice and the kids wanted to play at the park.
Winnie is a big girl now. She can climb this all by herself (if she has a spot. Otherwise she gets scared at the top.)
She tried to race Daddy across the field, and got a little bit left behind, so Seppi went out and took her hand to help her back.
Such a gentleman.
Little Farm in the Big City 