It's a two man job, so many tools to take over the road and someone (me) to decide what to chop off and thin out and someone to stand on the ladder base whilst the other tries to get up in the tree to do the actual work. Then you realise you can only reach a couple of the branches or twigs you wanted to cut off and have to come down again and move the heavy ladder. And all the while you are getting a rotten sore neck from all that looking up - which requires sunglasses against the bright light of the sky - which is probably why everything seems so gloomy, because then looking down at the ground it seems soooooooo dark!
I've been sending the OH up the ladder more and more, as he's got 8 inches on me and has more strength in his arms for using the loppers so I'm getting very bored standing around pointing, which is doubly hard when I have to think very hard which way is right and which is left.
I am most definitely not giving a tutorial on how to prune apple trees; suffice to say they do not grow like the book, any more than raspberries grow in a nice neat little line like the book shows or redcurrants grow into nice neat little one trunk bushes with no canes coming out of the ground like the book shows. This all makes it very difficult for a beginner as only time shows how things really grow; all I can say is that if you cut something, it will grow back with vigour, hence the next year you will have to cut again, and so it goes on. And on and on and on!
We had a break from all this over the weekend and I baked more crunchy chocolate brownie failures on Saturday for our annual winter hamlet get together. This resulted in a hasty decision on Sunday morning that I had to bake something else as I couldn't take a failure to an event where I have got a reputation for producing cake success, so with thanks to the stored apples we have, a quick fresh-ginger-and-apple-cake was produced, again proving it is failsafe, and everyone at the do seemed to like it. So is it worth all that hard work in the orchard? Look, it's six months since we started eating those apples, so in a word, YES!!!!!
Well you could do what someone here did to the local 'wild' apple tree - hack off all the branches that had apples on it! That would save you HOURS of careful selective pruning, although you might not get much of a harvest next season...
ReplyDeleteThe cake looks delicious, I shall have to remember it for the future :)
Probably not get much harvest for several seasons! Well 7 big trees done and one small one and 3 small pear trees still to do...... phew!
ReplyDeletemy life features apples a lot too at the mo- but i can be smug having finished the pruning. but i am trying to process the apples in storage as they are going bad now - much to the happiness of the sheep
ReplyDeleteDidn't realise sheep would like them! We had such a huge harvest we gave loads away to neighbours and their horses and now the wild birds and our chickens are enjoying the rubbery ones. Funny that the wild birds are not that interested in them earlier on in winter but now they just can't stop eating them - either they are very hungry as it's the start of nest building and mating season or they prefer the apples when they are going soft. Some of our apples are still quite good which is surprising as the winter has been mostly mild so the garage has been quite warm!
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