Back in the (pruning) saddle

Giselle, Susan and Stacey are back in the saddle in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard, ready to trim our trees. This is part of winter pruning, an important way to keep fruit trees healthy and productive.

It’s April 2019 and the volunteers of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard were ready and raring to go after a long and mean winter of cold weather, icy sidewalks, and grey skies. And it was a beautiful day to get our park in order!

The pruning team included Giselle, Stacey and Susan and our job was to carry out the winter pruning on our apple trees. Winter pruning, when done correctly, improves tree health and harvest quality.

Giselle uses a fantastic Fiskars pole pruner to bring down the height of this apple tree. One of our pruning goals is to keep our trees compact.

Stacey poses beside another apple tree. This one has a strong, sturdy, fruit-bearing structure, but needed quite a cleanup to reduce some of last year’s new growth.

We also had some new volunteers come to the park this week. Sophie’s job was to help seasoned volunteer Marilyn work on sprucing up the pollinator garden.

Sophie and Marilyn deadheaded some of the plants in the garden and trimmed back our yellow and red dogwood shrubs.

And Diane and Felix were also new. They did everything else that needed doing! They turned clippings from our fruit trees into high quality mulch, they trimmed down some suckers that were moving in towards our fruit trees, and they collected a huge bag of litter that had been scattered around the park during the winter.

Felix and Diane collecting the litter …after turning tender young fruit tree cuttings into top quality mulch!

Last but not least, Lisa came along to join us. Her job was to use her new fruit tree grafting skills in our park. One of our Asian pear trees came down a few years ago (we’re not sure how) but the root stock remained behind. So Lisa took some cuttings from another Asian pear and grafted them onto the root stock. We are hoping it works and that we’ll get a brand new tree growing there. More to come on that in a future blog.

Lisa with her grafting tools, ready to transform this root stock into a brand new tree. Hopefully it will work?

It was a wonderful day and we spent a total of 2.5 hours in the park. Would you like to join us in the future? Download our stewardship calendar here. Then email Lynn at growingforgreen (at) gmail.com to tell her to add you to our stewardship list.

Oh, and don’t miss our tenth anniversary event on June 2, 2019 in the park with an orchard tour, bake sale, free coffee and other fun stuff. See you soon!

Susan Poizner is the coordinator of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard and the founder of the fruit tree care website www.orchardpeople.com. She’s the host of The Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast and the author of the award-winning fruit tree care book Growing Urban Orchards.