What Did You Do In The Garden?

[Gardening with Rabbits]

Cleaned out the rabbit hutch, took out compost from a bin and filled it up with the rabbit manure and straw. I bought seed potatoes and shallots today. I bought Pontiac, russet, Yukon Gold, red/red, purple Viking and an early red.

 

[Nyboy]

Down the street from me there is a house with a apple orchard in front. The ancient apples trees had not been pruned in years. I loved them they where all twisted and bent. Company came in and did massive pruning on them. Took a couple of years but trees are now beautiful. I don't think you can over prune a apple tree.

 

[ducks4you]

I have heard that you can overprune an apple tree. I think that you need a reward when you prune so that you do NOT fear killing your tree! I break the small pieces into ~2 ft and take them to my firepit to enjoy. We ALWAYS have paper garbage from our Law Office, primarily bc DH insists on hard copies of the local paper every day, and every mistake is ripped into two and we burn it, so that goes in first, then anything else.
I have come to understand that fruit trees are programmed to replace the fruit and the shoots that are naturally chewed on by animals (in the wild) so that the next generation of fruit will survive. HowEVER, to produce a species of fruit, they are all grafted and many will cross-pollinate, so if you manage to start one from seed, it will most probably NOT be the same fruit as the parent.
http://pss.uvm.edu/homefruit/hfgprop.htm
My mission for my apple trees and my one pear tree is to prune small fruit this year to keep the limbs from breaking. Ironically, my pear tree, which suffered blight in 2016 is loaded with blossoms this year. In 2015 I got about 50 wonderful and sweet Bartlett pears, and I would like to keep it going.
I even hacked off 3/4 of my grape vines in March. Then I watched a program about an organic orchard and they only had growth in the center of the top of the vine and then the owner pinched off some of That for "good air circulation." I do have good air circulation and I figure that, yes, I killed off 1 vine, but the previous owners never pruned and THEY killed off 2 of the vines. You can see that the stakes are set up for 8 grape plants and there are only 5 left. I may try using my tree pot method and buy some grape starts in it and put them in in the Fall when DH and I replace the two wooden supports at the end that are rotten and broken off. This pot is about 2 foot deep and really allows for deep root growth, especially if I use aged compost to start them.
As I reported before, the 8 peaches, whose blossoms survived a record May 18 HARD FREEZE in 2016, were huge and magazine perfect. I have over 50 blossoms on this tree this year and I may have to snip off a few if I see too many on one branch.
Growing up in suburbia doesn't teach you this stuff!!

 

[thistlebloom]

Apples can be pruned hard, but when the pruning takes out good sized limbs you get into trouble. Those large wounds take a long time to callus over and in the meantime the wound is subject to infection from insects. The result is usually seen within 5 years as the tree dies off slowly.

I think fruit tree pruning is an art, and certainly not something I've got the hang of yet. I always doubt myself when I've lopped off a branch.

 

[Beekissed]

That's what I did to our old orchard....too much at once and I don't think they will ever recover. My own ignorance on that. But, they weren't producing much anyway before the pruning and they still don't produce much now, so we weren't out much.

 

[Nyboy]

Bee it takes a few years. My father used to butcher the ones in our yard, and he did it anytime he felt like it.

 

[catjac1975]

That's what I did to our old orchard....too much at once and I don't think they will ever recover. My own ignorance on that. But, they weren't producing much anyway before the pruning and they still don't produce much now, so we weren't out much.

Stand near them and say you should cut them down. My peach tree gave me4 bumper years after I threatened it. If you haven.t fertilized try that before giving up. I put a wheelbarrow full of manure under the tree in winter.i have read that humering nails into the tree can shock it into production.

 

[Zeedman]

Over the years, I had the questionable good fortune of 3 times moving into a home with neglected, over-grown fruit trees. Some Master Gardeners I had met when looking for advice said you should never prune off more than 1/3 of the wood in a given year, and I followed that advice. It took me 2 years to completely trim two over-grown peach trees, but the fruit then went from apricot size, to just under baseball size. I moved from there to a home with a severely over-grown pomegranate, which had little 2" fruit, and not many of them. By the time I left 3 years later, the tree was loaded with softball-sized fruit.

Note that the trend is for me to improve the trees - then move, and allow others to reap the benefits of my efforts. Frustrating, to say the least.

At my present home, I inherited two over-grown apple trees. One had two equally-sized trunks - one if which was from the rootstock! That produced only small, green, useless fruit, so I cut it down (apple wood is great firewood, by the way). The other tree needed 2 years to take off all the suckers. After 3 years, both trees were bearing well... then one became infected by fire blight, and had to be cut down before it could affect the other. Fortunately, the other tree is still doing well; my neighbor's crab apple is pollinating it.

 

[lcertuche]

I noticed some potatoes are finally coming up. I also sprinkled some 10-10-10 in the garden. I have to do it sneaky so the chickens don't run over to eat it. Brats! I need so much to get a fence up. DH and the Wildbunch are no help at all. My tomato seedlings almost died because no one was watering them but a few came back. The peppers looked pretty good but the cilantro is dead. I will be planting them in the ground as soon as possible due to the fence problems.

 

[Smart Red]

I cleaned out the strawberry bed. Also was gifted with a bit of Dutchman's britches from a garden I visited today. Planting them tomorrow in the shady part of the butterfly garden.