Getting a handle on pruning
I've learned the hard
way that if our woody perennials aren't taken care of before spring
gets underway, they are quickly pushed to the end of the list and lost
in the shuffle. Last year, a third of our raspberries never got
pruned, fertilized, or mulched, and as a result their fruits were half
the size of the more tended patch. So, this week we're going to
focus on perennials and get them all sorted out and ready to taken on
2010.
I started on Monday by
pruning the fruit trees. In past years, I've spent hours out
there, looking back and forth between my trees and the pruning section
of my master gardener handbook. But this year --- my fourth year
of pruning --- I suddenly felt empowered and able to make short work of
the tree pruning. It helped that last year's summer
pruning and training
had left the trees in really good shape, so my "pruning" mostly
consisted of retying my training strings a little further out on the
branches, with a snip here and there to take out dead wood,
watersprouts, or crossing shoots.
I'm also starting to get
the hang of the two systems I'm using. I'm training our peaches
and nectarine to the open center system and our plum, cherry
(pictured at the top of the page), apples, and pears to the central
leader system. I still don't know if my pruning method is right, but at least it's starting
to become consistent from year to year.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I haven't yet had much to prune, as we landed on an open pasture and all of our trees are still quite small-- and some maybe even dead from the horrible winter we had-- though the figs have been resilient in the past. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading your experiences with pruning. This is our second year on the homestead and when you describe the tentative process you've gone through in learning these techniques, I can totally relate. Everything I do around here is done with a big question mark and a lot of reading beforehand.
It's nice to hear that you're getting more comfortable with it. This is something I've been thinking about and will have to tackle soon, I'm sure.