Pruning an apple tree for size
When I was waiting for warmer weather before pruning this winter,
one of our readers suggested marking which limbs I wanted to cut to
save time later. The suggestion made me realize how far I've come in my
perennial-pruning education. Just five or six years ago, I would have
done precisely that, but now my eye chooses the next cut in the time it
takes for me to reach the wood with my pruning shears --- no more
agonizing over choice of direction or lost wood.
That said, I did
spend a minute or two agonizing before cutting the entire top out of
this apple tree. But when it last fruited, two years ago, the tree was
shorter and we still would have had to pull out a ladder to get to the
top fruits. The height meant I didn't thin blooms at the top of the
tree, and the resulting apples hit the ground before they were
harvested. Quality was much lower for the tree-top fruits than for the
apples I was able to baby lower on the tree.
So I lopped off quite a bit of wood this year, leaving a weakly
upward-pointing scaffold that I hope will prevent the tree from sending
up scads of watersprouts to replace the central leader I removed.
Barring late freezes (which means tree fruit is a 50/50 chance around
here if everything else is going well), we should get another good harvest from this Virginia Beauty. At the moment, I agree with our extension agent
in thinking that this variety is the tastiest heirloom apple around.
But I haven't tasted the other 35 varieties we have in the ground yet!
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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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