Pruning Our Trees

Tamara and I have worked out a division of labor - or more accurately, a division of responsibility, since we'll be sharing the work anyways - by which she is in charge of vegetables, berries, bees, and preservation through drying and I take care of the animals, fruit trees, mushrooms, and canning.

This means learning about the art of the orchardist falls squarely on me.  Fortunately, I have thoroughly browsed Michael Phillips', The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist, a must own for any grower of fruit trees, and was given a hands on tutorial from Phil of the Philadelphia Orchard Project when we were both helping out at Mill Creek Urban Farm this past summer.

Yesterday, Tamara and I braved the cold to prune our apple trees.  It took us about four hours to finish up three of them.  They have been neglected for a good 15 years and were in pretty bad shape, which makes me optimistic for shorter pruning times in the future.  Still, I don't want to think about the upkeep involved with an actual orchard.

Even on our scale, apples take a lot of work year round to manage, let alone organically, but we are looking forward to it.  I'm even getting excited to purchase my first gallons of neem oil and liquid fish for spraying.  We have a good amount of comfrey to make a tea for spraying as well.  Which starts me wondering how easy it would be to make my own liquid fish?  All I need are fish guts, a blender, and some wire mesh.  It might be worth it with sustainable liquid fish going for about $30 per gallon.  I think I smell a future blog post, complete with video.

Mali trying to help prune

Tamara and I in the top of a tree (she's invisible though)