Thankfully our trees have provided fruit, even though we given them very little love, since we moved in. After attending the Fruit Tree Q&A, I realized they desperately needed a major pruning. I had no experience pruning trees or bushes, so there was no way I was going to do it myself this year! Good thing for me, there is a local company dedicated to teaching orchard maintenance.  Today, Kim from Orchard Keepers spent a full day pruning all of our trees! She let me spend the first couple hours watching and learning from her. It was information overload, but I took a few notes, and hopefully I can do the next prune myself!

She showed me how to identify one-year old wood, two-year old wood, and so on. The smoother the wood, the younger it is. She was able to give me a rough guess of their age. I thought the smaller trees were young; however, looking at the wood on the trunk, she thought most of the trees were 20 -30 years old. I was shocked! Based on their age, she suggested planting a couple new trees this spring. While that sounds exciting, I’m not sure if that’ll happen since I barely know how to maintain these trees! Continue reading →