Here is another image of Jen’s pruning handwork/swath of destruction .
As you can see, its a bit wet out out there - that is the plum tree, I think. Not much to report here, just something to use for comparison later.
This past weekend, while I was no doubt taking a nap, my wife Jen decided that it was right time to prune the fruit trees. I walked outside in the late afternoon to find her teetering in the middle of an old apple tree with what looked like the remnants of a massacre at its base. Branches, sticks, small logs littered at the foot of most of the trees in my backyard.
What madness hath she wrought on these poor trees!
You can see some of her handiwork in that picture. She had just finished giving the two on the left a buzzcut.
The trees that we inherited had, at one time, been trained. But much like our lawn, they had been on the former owners’ back burner of projects. So the darned old things, wanting to grow every year, focus their energy into thin branches that shoot straight up from the tree - these are called, and I am not kidding, suckers. These small branches will suck the energy of the plant into growing these multiple, literally fruitless shoots, and not spend that same energy on making quality apples or pears.
The best time to prune, I gather, is late in the winter, a practice called dormant pruning. In late fall, the trees build up energy stores to aid the plant through the winter. When you remove the little sucker branches from the tree, that stored energy is still in the plant. So, when it starts back up in the spring, it will be able to focus its energy more effectively, encourage planned growth and hopefully setting the stage for more fruit from the tree. Get it?
Jen readily admitted she had no idea what she was doing, chomping and cutting mostly by intuition and assumption. She may have killed the trees, but at least she took action, right?
I am sure she did enough reading on it and just decided to put a little mid-winter doubt into our backyard equation. We looked at some of the neighbors trees and they are similar in shape to what we ended up with.
More or less.