Fruit trees

Earlier this week I was gifted with an unplanned day off from work – I forgot that Town Meeting Day is a state holiday in Vermont.  The weather was an unseasonably cool 10 degrees with a light breeze, but the sun was shining.  I headed out to the backyard with my big snow boots, pruners and loppers and had at them fruit trees.  There are hundreds of how to prune your tree guides out there so I will not regurgitate the how.  Fall and winter are the perfect times to prune your fruit trees.  Pruning keeps the trees healthy and improves their overall quality and productivity.  People have known this for years, but it was only last year that I saw the results first hand.

The spring after I moved into the family farmhouse my father sent us three fruit trees.  Pathetic looking little things, they arrived as bare root twigs in a cardboard box, barely protected from the elements with small little plastic bags tied around their roots to keep the moisture in.  I thought he was nuts for ordering fruit trees since we have forty or more varieties of apple tree on this farm, but who am I to question.  I dutifully dug three holes and planted three, lifeless looking twigs.  Fertilized and watered and protected from pests the little twigs sprouted a few leaves and a couple of branches the first year.

After that I didn’t pay them much mind.  I sprayed them a couple times a year to keep the worst of the pests at bay, but it seemed to be a losing battle with the Japanese beetles.  Dad was up to visit in the fall of 2011 and asked me if I had ever pruned these trees?  I confessed that I hadn’t dared because I didn’t want to kill them.  We discussed whether they had flowered, what if any fruit they had produced and what pest problems they were having.  He took a couple of branches off the first tree, told me to repeat the process on the next two and we should have a better showing the in 2012. 

The flowers that spring were gorgeous and plentiful.  Then there was the late frost; all of the trees had already budded and begun to flower, it hurt the apple industry significantly that year.  Dad said they looked good but that I wasn’t being aggressive enough.  Last winter I armed myself with knowledge – books, magazine articles, the Internet and advice from actual, real people.  Some of the older locals told me I was nuts trying to prune them trees they had been neglected for far too long, they don’t have a chance of good production any more.  I told them that Dad had sent me some baby trees a couple years ago; ‘Now why’d he go ‘n do that?  There plenty o’ trees on that farm.”  In talking with several folks I found someone a little closer to my age and a little less set in their ways to tell me that being a LITTLE more aggressive would be good.  The worst thing I could do is have a bad year and then I knew that I had to a lot more gentle the following winter.  We had a bumper crop of plums, only 2/3 of which I lost to some kind of worm in the middle.  A sad crop off apples – four I think – but they were big, beautiful, delicious baking apples.  And no pears – this is the tree that I thought I had over done it – I didn’t go far enough.

I am still learning and am sure that someone with more experience would have done a much better job, but it worked last year, we’ll see how well it works for 2014.  This weekend I am mixing up a batch of homemade dormant oil spray to see if I can eradicate them pesky worms.  The few plums we had last summer were juicy and delicious, this year the bugs will not get so many!