We were lucky to get an abundance of fruit from our apricot, peach, prune and plum trees this year, which kept me busy in the kitchen. The figs are finishing (thank goodness, it's hard to know what to do with 30 kilos of them and there are only so many one can give away it seems) and we've picked our first lot of quinces. Now that the trees have stopped fruiting and are getting ready to go to sleep over winter, and we've a wee reprieve from preserving their bounty, it's time to give them all a prune.
In previous years pruning has felt like a mammoth chore because we've had to squeeze all the pruning into one weekend. Now that we're not working, we've been able to take our time and prune a few trees each day. This also means that we've been able to pay more attention to how we prune them. Not that we actually know what we're doing. We have learnt a lot from my lovely Mum (who grew up on an orchard) by watching videos, reading ABC Gardening Australia magazines and listening to Sabrina on the radio on a Saturday morning. This year we've been able to utilise what we have learnt more effectively. Hopefully that means we'll get lots of fruit again next season.
Because we grow our trees in a shade house (we call it that but it's actually constructed from bird netting, not shade cloth) we prune the summer fruiting trees twice a year. Once at the end of Summer to control their size. This is vital so they don't grow through the roof of the shade house. And then again at the end of winter, when they've dropped their leaves, to remove dead wood, create the nice vase shape all the experts talk about and take out any branches that are crossing each other. This year we paid particular attention to the fruiting spurs as we pruned them to size. And, because we've got bacterial canker we sterilised our pruning tools between trees, and between cuts on the already badly infected trees.
This is how the trees looked before we pruned them:
They were growing right into the roof of the shade house and there wasn't a lot of room to walk through them. They were lovely and shady while we were picking the fruit though.
Now, they look like the ones in the pics below. Or variations thereof. The amount of pruning depended on the type of tree. The loquat (in the first pic) can be cut back quite hard and will bounce back and still fruit. Some of the others needed a less drastic haircut.
The late apricot had a very drastic prune. We're not sure if it will fruit next year but, everything we read said to prune below the canker as much as possible. Even if we don't get any fruit for the next couple of years, hopefully we will have saved the tree.
Now we just have to do something with the branches that were pruned off. This pile is just from the loquat. Those will be put through the shredder and used as mulch or in the compost. We can't do that with the ones affected by canker though. We will do a bit more research and dispose of thoses in the safest, least wasteful way we can.
All in all, it took us about a week to prune the trees. Although it is quite a lot of work it's very satisfying because we know (or at least hope) the trees will reward us with lots of fruit next Summer. Fingers crossed. I guess we better start eating some of the produce we preserved this year and make room for next year's crop.
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