Lee Reich's The Pruning Book is worthy of a lunchtime series, but it's summer, so you'll just get a review with a few choice tidbits.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, from the structure (30 pages on pruning basics, then sections on each type of plant you might want to prune) to the visuals (which include both informative drawings and photographs).  I've always liked Lee Reich's method of researching and presenting facts, but still inserting bits and pieces of personal experience, and this book was no exception.

None of the information in The Pruning Book is particularly earth-shattering, and you can find most or all of it on extension service websites.  In fact, that's how I've been garnering my pruning information so far --- in bits and pieces from short articles.  However, reading the same information in book form, I connected dots I hadn't realized needed to be connected, for example realizing that pruning a hedge follows many of the same rules as pruning a fruit tree.  In both cases, you need to start training the plants during the first year, and to prune so that light hits all parts of the plant.  (As a side note, The Pruning Book has more information on hedges, pollarding, and espaliers than I'd found anywhere else.)

Do you understand why a heading cut makes plants bush out while a thinning cut merely redirects energy to existing limbs?  Did you know that thinning young fruits not only ensures the remaining fruits are larger, but also that the tree doesn't decide to skip fruiting next year?  I'll regale you with more tidbits as I summer prune our orchard and berry patch over the course of the next week.

Although I suspect I'll outgrow this book in two or three years, at the moment it's found a place on my permanent bookshelf.  Now, if I could just find an equally good book about grafting....

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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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