The Grounded Orchardist

When you do your research for anything in horticulture there are hard fast rules to abide by. This very much includes fruit trees. You must only winter prune between…. and…., you must only summer prune between…. and…., only prune stone fruit …..,

But, what if the weather breaks the rules? What if there’s no risk of rain because we’re in drought, that could mean that we can prune stone fruit earlier! What if there’s so much rain you just have to risk spreading canker to get the job done?

When you’re farming and have thousands of trees you have to break the rules or the job doesn’t get done. It used to take me 6 months to prune the trees on the farm by myself. That overlaps the timescale given by “the rules”. They never suffered and you quickly learn to work around the many variables, not the books. Of course we tried not to prune in the rain or when it was forecast, to limit the spread of disease such as Canker and silverleaf disease.

We have a couple of Kiwi vines at work and I had to apply the new Zealand rule book to our climate. Almost as a translation and apply it as necessary. This involved picking the fruit unripe before the first frost and ripening them up in our polytunnel as we do not have a long enough growing season for them to ripen on the vine. We may have to tweak the book advice to all other fruit…even apples and pears.

I’m not suggesting we ditch the books, I have a fairly vast fruit based library. Just that we gain the confidence to use the valuable advice and tweak as necessary. I’ve spoken to a few people this week about the fact we can break the rules and while we’re learning to live with climate change, we may have to more and more.