Pruning
Yes, I’ve been getting pruning fever lately. I’ll just repeat what I wrote elsewhere, to lead off….
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Pruning fever is a lot like trailbuilding fever, I suppose. Improving the land and all. So I’ve read up in the Master Gardener notebook that Martha got from the MSU Extension Service (Go, last vestige of Land Grant College!) and pruned our fruit trees and berry brambles. I pruned my brother’s trees and our neighbors as well. And their grapevines. There’s a 100 ways to prune grape *cultivars*, don’t you know. It was so cool diving in and just doing it. So that the plants are happier, healthier and bear tons of fruit.
I also realized that it pays to go with the flow. That’s a big part of organic farming. What does your area like to produce? Well, around here the blackberries just come by themselves by the heaps. So I’m encouraging them. I think I see blackberry wine in our future. In past summers, it becomes a part of my every morning ritual to go out in the yard and pick a quart for breakfast from our wild berries. Once a week I pick an extra gallon for freezing. Maybe this year we’ll have an explosion of them, thanks to my pruning. Or maybe not…who knows if I did it right?!
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Back to pruning. It was cool to work on our neighbors 8 big old trees. I filled their yard with brush afterwards and didn’t know if I’d really done them any favor, now that they’d have a week’s cleanup. I could’ve hauled all that brush in an hour, but I ran out of time and had to get back to my deadlines. Besides, there’s a teen at that house….
Pruning is like editing. I love the principles involved. I go by the simple MSU concepts presented, I suppose, for average folk. We have a couple other pruning books, one from Britain, that show different methods, but they all use similar concepts.
The idea is to prioritize for health and produce. This naturally results in good looks as well.
Apples, cherries and pears
You want a nice, strong trunk. Fruit within arm’s reach. You want all limbs, foliage and fruit to be just so.
So you prune so that about 6 limbs sprout out of the trunk, each separated by a foot or so. They should come out pointing in different directions. Limbs shouldn’t come out of the trunk at the same level or in the same direction—too much stress. You want enough top area limbs to protect the tree from the sun, but not any more. You don’t want much height or fruit to be wasted.
Cut out almost all suckers but a few for shading. So that you end up with a structurally sound prioritized series of trunk, limb, small sidebranches, fruit. Without the ordering mixed up too much. That way all the weight is supported nicely.
Back to the limbs: As each limb projects outward, side branches should jut out to the left and right every foot or so, alternating. Not from the same point.
And guess what we do with branches that jut upwards or downward? Prune them off! —Because the upwards ones shade out what’s below and the downwards ones are always shaded! What a neat thing!
Let each limb take up its own space in the tree. If a limb or sidebranch juts out over another, cut it off.
Don’t usually leave big stumps where you prune. Cut flush. When pruning big limbs, it might be OK to leave a stump that will rot and be healed over. There’s new theory there that says that flushcutting and painting isn’t good. But with small pruning, cut flush. It looks better, results in less suckers, I suspect.
When you get done giving a tree a good pruning, it doesn’t look like it had a haircut, but that’s kind of what you’ve given it: a good healthy haircut. Bad pruning has what is called the haircut effect because people often ‘prune’ so that all branches are the same length. What you really want to do is start by pruning the biggest features, and work to the small ones. Less is best. Often removing a limb solves a host of problems.
It’s so cool to see trees after they’ve been revived after having been neglected. They look so happy.
Oh, and you prune before budding. You can expect to get a heavier fruit yield even that first year, if you haven’t pruned too hard. Don’t take away more than the upper third of an overgrown tree. It needs to adapt to the revival for a year or two.
Another cool concept is that the heavier the fruit, the more structurally prioritized your pruning has to be, with an eye on making sure that every side branch has strong, direct support from a limb. After a couple years of pruning a mature apple, it will look quite sparse and stout in winter, but can easily bear much heavy fruit without breaking come fall.
The flipside is with lightweight cherries. You can let small branches pop out all along limbs and trunk even. Keep a structure, but let it ‘fuzz’ out. The cherries need less support.
Grapes
Grapes are famous for being very frustrating to revive. When you see an old grape arbor, you tend to throw your hands up. It’s a wilderness of vines everywhere. But really it’s an opportunity for some very rewarding and fun ‘editing.’
First thing: make sure the arbor is straight and strong. Rebuild it. When the new vines regrow on it, it will be hard to alter.
Then select the trunks you want to keep. Find them about 1-2″ in diameter every foot or so. Bigger ones can be too old, smaller are too young. Pick ones where you can make the trunk rise straight to the trellis wire and be tied there. This is hard when unpruned vines have grown into trees and gotten very long before the canes start offshooting. I don’t know how to solve that problem. I ended up coiling some trunks! Cut out the other trunks. Tie up your selected ones. Now, prune back the canes.
Berries and grapes follow a similar rule in that a cane bears fruit for a year, then dies, then is replaced by a new cane.
First off, prune out all the dry, flaky, brittle old canes that bore fruit last year.
Now we come to another nifty grape revival concept. The root system needs time to adapt to revival. So that the first year you leave 8 canes on a trunk, the 2nd you leave 6, 3rd leave 4 and 4th leave only 2 canes a year! A fully functioning trunk has two canes each season with starting buds left for the next years canes. The other aspect of this concept is that you prune buds off the canes. Leave only about 10 buds per cane. It’s hard to make yourself prune this hard when vines wind around forever so prettily in such a jungly tangle, but you have to for a maximum crop and best hardiness.
Then tie up your remaining canes to the trellis wires. And wait for summer!
There’s probably a whole bunch that I’ll have to learn about spraying, but for now, I think I’ll ditch my organic roots. In the charts I see that despite the complexity and the range of choices that ‘All Purpose Spray’ is listed for most tree fruit to be applied every couple weeks all summer. I’m going to keep it simple. I won’t ever want to certify my trees. But I plan to treat them organically shortly. It’s interesting to note that the organic sprays seem awfully chemical in their own right and seem to use compounds, like copper and sulphur and who knows what, that the chemical growers also use.
But I haven’t sprayed my trees yet. I see that bugs already ate most of my tiny little pears. Those rats! I might try to hang those bug-catcher sticky things as well. Also, the deer eat the lower leaves.
I’ve wrapped the trunks of my trees and cleared away old weeds. This keeps bugs and rodents and rot from the trunks. I’ve also cut out weed trees growing in the vicinity.
Bramble Culture
That’s what they call taking care of berries with prickers on them. Nice term, I think. Basically, they say to take the excess growth off of the tips and to shorten up the laterals, which is where the fruiting occurs. A little cutting back encourages more fruit. We’ll see if it works on my wild stuff. Also, take out all old cane.
Here goes!
