Winter Fruit Pruning

This week was spent with the fruit department once again and our task was to work on pruning the over 1,000 apple trees in the orchard. Though we did not get anywhere near done pruning all of them we got a good start.  The week started out with a tutorial on training young apple trees and then moved on to learning how to prune bush apple trees.  We looked at an example of a bush apple tree that had never been pruned.  It was quite the site to see a mess to say the least but interestingly the apple still produces fruit though it may be smaller, lower quality, and harder to harvest.  Monday and Tuesday were spent on the bush trees it involved a lot of ladder work which was a bit tricky.  It took ages to prune some of the large bush trees which are quite old some of the top branches are out of reach for fruit picking even with a ladder and needed to be cut back.  Most mornings were spent discussing pruning while we waited for it to get light enough out that we could see what we were pruning.  Wednesday we got the tutorial on spindal tree pruning which is how most commercial apples are grown.  Thursday we got to look at other trained fruit like grapes and berries.  The week was a blast and the pruning could be relaxing at times but quite stressful when you got to a tough tree.  I learned a lot about fruit pruning and can't wait to go home and try it out on my trees!