It’s May 12, 2020 and Toronto’s Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard volunteers are back in action! Due to COVID-19, we have had to avoid the park for a while. But now, as the result of new city rules, community gardens are considered an essential service. After all, we are growing food and we all need food for a healthy and sustainable future.

So we’re back in action, but in a different way. Our volunteers are now dividing up into small groups of “Garden Buddies” and we are going out to work in teams of 3 or 4 people only. We keep our hands clean. We keep our distance. We each have our own gloves and tools. And now we can safely work in the garden.

This Tuesday one of the Garden Buddy teams met in the orchard. Susan and Giselle worked on pruning the fruit trees and a new volunteer, Dani, worked on weeding the mulch circles. Each spring we feed our fruit trees to give them energy to blossom, grow branches, and to grow fruit for us to eat. Fruit trees take in their food through their root systems. But if there are weeds competing with the tree for nutrition, the trees will suffer. So, one of our most important jobs is to weed around the trees and prepare the soil for organic amendments.

Dani did a fantastic job! She started with a sad looking tree surrounded with weeds. But then, armed with a weeding fork and an edging spade, Dani worked for two hours. The end result was a happy tree, ready to devour some fantastic fruit tree nutrition to give it energy for the growing season to come! You can see what the tree looks like now.

While Dani worked on one of the apple trees, Susan and Giselle pruned some apricot and plum trees. Correct fruit tree pruning is a fantastic way to improve fruit tree health and productivity. Here are some of the benefits of annual fruit tree pruning:

• We create a strong, fruit bearing structure for our trees
• We ensure each branch will have access to the sun so that the fruit will ripen properly
• We improve air circulation in the canopy to help prevent common fruit tree pest and disease problems.
• We keep our fruit trees compact, so that they are easy to prune, harvest and care for in the years to come.

Giselle did a wonderful job on our two apricot trees, while Susan pruned an Asian pear tree and two plum trees.

We currently have three groups of “Garden Buddies” who will meet at different times of the week to care for our fruit trees and pollinator garden. For now, the pollinator garden team (made up of Lynn, Marilyn, and Sherry) will have to wait as the city hasn’t yet given us the green light to work in the garden yet. We hope we will be able to do so soon.

In the meantime, our next tree care team, made up of Reenie, Janina and Ruth, will be in the park on Friday morning. Their task is to prune the cherry tree and to continue working on the mulch circles. Susan put flagging tape on some of the cuts they will make in the cherry tree this week. And slowly, slowly the orchard will be ready for a new growing season. Let’s hope it’s a successful, joyful and productive one!