Orchard Work

Good morning sweetie!

The other day I noticed that I needed to do some serious pruning.  The downside of having trees and berries is that there are a lot of bacteria, bugs, and fungi that try to ruin your dreams of award winning fruit preserves at the county fair :).

We returned a dead tree to a local greenhouse and while I was there, I discovered that one of my pears had fireblight.  This is a disease that comes through the blossoms.  Next year, we will start a proactive spraying campaign, but there are no more blooms this year, so this should not be a problem.  What fireblight does is make the leaves, then the stem, look like it was burnt up.  Sure enough, that is what one large stem and a few shoots on my pear tree looked like.

With my berries, I just noticed that some of the branches were dead or dying back.  I am not sure what caused that, but trimming the dead off could not hurt, no matter what.  However, I also had to make sure I did not transfer disease from one plant to another.  I attacked this like it was a veritable Berry Ebola ;)

I started out with a trash bag, clippers, latex gloves, and disinfectant.  I disinfected the clippers and my gloves between EACH bush and tree that I trimmed--even if the bushes were right next to each other.  All the trimmings were carefully gathered and placed in a bag (these should NEVER be composted or left around--only burned or thrown away).  This was perfectly easy with the pear...but the thorny blackberries were another problem altogether.  They bit right through the gloves (ouch) and hung up in the trash bag.  Next time:  bigger trash bag, better gloves, smaller and more numerous cut branches ;). 

You see how some of the branches are spindly, off colored, and/or dead?  I trimmed back a few inches PAST the healthy point.

 

This sometimes meant that a branch that was healthy and had berries on it, but was an off shoot of an affected branch, got cut.  I only wept a little ;)

 

Now, some of these branches of the berries might have just been damaged in transit, planting, or were last years floricane.  Many brambles (black and rasp berries) have a primocane, then have a floricane.  The primocane is the first year's growth and does not fruit, BUT will be next year's floricane.  So when you prune, make sure you do not prune next year's fruiting canes!
However, other brambles are not biennial and they produce the fruit on the first year of a cane's growth.

 

The benefits of one over the other depends on when you want your crop.  A fall crop can be had on plants that are entirely primocane.  A summer crop occurs on floricane varieties.

 

Anyway, since these were not horribly diseased looking masses of wretchedness, it could be they just were done and needed to be pruned.  So I did.

 

 

I went in progression from not as bad plants, to "I KNOW this is bad" plants.  The berries might have been just damaged or that was natural for them.  However THIS:

...is most definitely not natural.  One deeply dark, shriveled, wretched looking branch.

 

This was dreadful and I cut the branch way back.  At the time I did not know what it was--I just found out yesterday that it was fireblight.  There were some shoots that also had been affected.  I cut everything as far back as I thought necessary, bagged and tossed it.  Then nuked the heck out of my shears :).

 

 

So, that was my first pruning adventure.  I did make a discovery though....see when guys prune, at least the ones I have met (ahem, TWS ;) ), have to be WATCHED LIKE A HAWK when they go to prune or trim.  Entire yards of trees around here are topped off like they went through a ham shaver.  TWS does NOT top off trees, but he does get a little happy with the tree trimmer, so we have an understanding that *I* point out the limbs to be removed, and if he wants to cut off anything else, he has to tell me why ;).  Normally I do not boss him around like that AT ALL.  In fact, I trust him implicitly with my life, my children, my future, my spiritual growth....but not with trimming back the trees.  (Actually, he only went trim happy once, long ago, and now it is sort of a joke between us ;) ).

BUT once I started trimming back my own berries and tree, I realized WHY that happens.  WOW the power of a tiny pair of pruning shears is astounding.  I went from "Be VERY careful, only prune a LITTLE bit that is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY" to "PRUNE ALL THE THINGS!" (insert that little pinterest guy as a visual...but put a pair of pruning shears in his hand lololol).  I allowed myself, as an experiment, ONE berry bush to trim way back.  We will see if that was a good idea or not. ;)

 

 

OH!  Speaking of berries!  A friend of mine mentioned that she has discovered a ton of wild blackberries on her property.  I have been looking around mine and all I have discovered is more poison ivy.  HOWEVER, last night after we visited the back pond, we drove around the back 40 and discovered a blackberry thicket!  So even if my cultivars do not make it, hopefully the wild ones will.