With Seamus away for a birthday "shay-cation" with Grandma and Grandpa, I have two days to tackle some of the less kid-friendly farm tasks. Today I focused my attention on pruning our orchard. Pruning trees with kids is nearly impossible given their 10 second attention span. I have tried all the tricks in the book to make it fun for them but my boys will only tolerate so much stick collecting, stick piling, stick sword fighting, stick fort building, or stick "planting". They also lack the self awareness to avoid getting hit in the head by falling branches and someone almost always ends up getting brained.
Given my temporarily kid-free status, it was the perfect early spring day to spend some quality time with my apple and pear trees. I even got bit of a sunburn on my forehead.
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| All done! |
Something I always try to remember when pruning is that when you are done, a bird should be able to fly through the tree. You are looking to encourage air flow without removing more than one third of the branches.
I got so into pruning that I even pruned the suckers off our amur maple tree.
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| Before - sucker central. |
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| After - not a sucker in sight. |
I am hardly a pruning expert but I give it my best effort. On a sunny day like today, there are many worse things to be doing.
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