An Arkansas Black, partially pruned
Standing on the orchard ladder, I reached high over my head and made an initial cut to a large branch. Removing it would allow the sunlight to filter through to the inner branches. This Arkansas Black is one of our more productive apple trees. It is also a handsome tangle of branches, seemingly budding out and growing in every conceivable direction.
While pruning can be the perfect meditative activity, initially it is a task of almost daunting proportions (one that would surely be made simpler if I pruned more often than every five years). But an afternoon spent slowly and methodically studying and removing unneeded growth can be a fine restorative, particularly after so many weeks of gray skies.
This rare winter day had us both outside all day, not for the chores that needed to be done, but instead for the sheer pleasure of marking every degree the low January sun traced across the Southern sky. We still had to slog through slurry and ponding water, the result of an unrelenting rain that has spawned a small cottage industry of memes (“Thank goodness it is raining; my mud was getting dehydrated”), yet under blue skies, with nary a cloud in sight, our spirits lifted even as the mud sucked at our boots.
A friend had come out earlier in the morning to help clear brush from a fence line and clean up the orchard. We finished before lunch. We then took some time to remove the water sprouts, those skinny whips shooting up from the base of a trunk, from the fruit trees. A bit after noon, we headed to the house for a bowl of soup. Even lunch was taken on the front porch, where we continued to marvel at the perfect weather.
The day had begun, as always, with the noisy coffee grinder whirring, followed by my turning out two dogs and bringing in a third. But even at five o’clock I could feel the promise of the day to come: stars blinked high overhead and Venus hung luminous in the East.
A little before sunrise and dressed for the chill, I pulled on my Wellingtons and walked out to begin the chores. The pigs needed fresh water, and I turned on the spigot at the well house. They squealed insistently, so as the water trough filled, I restocked their automatic feeders, both tasks that must be completed every three days.
Fifteen minutes later, with the water turned off and feeders filled, I headed to the barn to tend the sheep. Usually our first lambs are on the ground by December 31st. This year, for reasons long and complicated, the onset of the lambing season has remained uncertain.
Feeding time
I entered the barn to be greeted by the most pleasant of sights for a husbandman: a ewe quietly nursing twins. Their tails rotated like propellers in satisfaction as they greedily suckled, and their mother chuckled deeply in encouragement.
I knew then, even before the sun had cleared the ridge, that it was going to be a beautiful day.
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A note: I’ve added a new page on the header for the blog. It will link to a weekly picture update on the gardens and orchard for 2019. It is scheduled to come out each Friday. So, check back from time to time and see how my garden grows.
Brian, Brian, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With a nice new piggy picture on the blog it seems. Looking forward to the season’s garden pics.
Your apple pruning technique fascinates. Once in 5 years whether they need it or not?? Have you noticed annual patterns in productivity? How about reactions between different varieties of apple? Perhaps the differences are slight, but the plant breeder in me imagines there would be differences. Still, being out of doors in early January in the Northern Hemisphere is great. If apple pruning is the best excuse, so be it.
And here’s me already thinking past the rhyme towards Agatha Christie. Hope that’s allowed.
Good to see regular piccy updates from the garden to get one going in one’s own, too.
Arkansas Black doesn’t seem to be biennial, if that’s what you mean, Clem. Pruning will have some effect on cropping, but probably not the kind Brian’s doing.
Curiously enough, I have the definitive guide to pruning in my posession and have offered it to a few people, yet never heard back from any of them. There is a religious element to it, and one hath perhaps been a little too forceful in belittling other’s credes.
Gentlemen,
Thanks for the cards and letters. My pruning strategy remains basic:
1. Remove most crisscrossing branches
2. Maintain space between trees by pruning lateral branches that intrude on the alley, usually at a bud.
3. Prune for direction: too much upward lift on a branch, select a downward bud and cut off right after.
4. Prune for aesthetics: I like a wild look to my fruit trees. So, I’m keeping that twisty wild looking branch.
With that said, I realized this year that I’m now in possession of a twenty-year-old orchard. So, I’m trying to maintain it and make it as productive as possible.
Cheers,
Brian
I am really glad you’re bringing aesthetics into it. Most uninitiated will insist on there being scientific reason behind where to pinch the buds and put the butt (ends), and we would have to object (by propellering our fingers in front of our vest pockets).
Arboreal cubism on the other hand one can always relate to, nobleman or not.
Not for me, Michael, the ways of the espalier.
It’s certainly not espaliers we’re after, but the health, productivity and longevity of the tree. If you don’t want to delve into my book (it’d be pictures only I’m afraid), I urge you to source one of Claus Mattheck’s books – especially his children’s books, which are so wonderful and informative adults rarely seem to want to part with them.
Biennial production is one piece of interest. And I also have a couple references to guide the prospective pruner – one of which seems more ‘religious’ than the other. I should dig it out to see if we’re singing from the same hymnal.
Biennial production as you note can be managed through pruning and through rootstock selection to some extent. Fertilization, irrigation if needed, fruit thinning, and other managements can influence production per year as well. Going for a wild aesthetic is an interesting objective.
I’ve never seen a solid publication on pruning in English except for those on dwarf plantations. But then I see trees here where the correct pruning technique has apparently been acquired and then misapplied in parts…
Clem,
The three pigs in the pic are the very same three little pigs that staged the great escape back in August.
So the one facing us is Steve McQueen??
The marketing group over at GP wants me to suggest you charge a premium when you sell the ‘breakout bacon’, or the ‘on the lamb ham’… pictures and backstory are always important in a good promotional campaign.
Nicely put, sir. I’ll have to squeeze in attribution to you somewhere on the label.
Great capture of the ewe and lamb!
Thanks. I had to lay flat on the barn floor for that one.
I agree on the photo. It’s wonderful. I imagine they won’t be that white ever again, what with your mud situation. I’m glad you had such a sweet day regardless of the mud, and can keep some humor in the mix. I look forward to more photos as the season evolves.
Thanks, Sarah. Fingers crossed that I can keep up with the project…not to mention the garden.
I’m guessing there are no comments on the garden page (or I’m too dense to see how it’s done… no help needed deciding which).
So here’s my question about the first installment. On the outside collards… you’ve had no freezing temps yet? I can see them hanging on longer than many things, but would have thought a hard freeze would take them. Do they still taste like a respectable collard? If not for us, would the livestock be interested? (oops, appears I can’t count either).
Do they perhaps even get sweeter/more rounded in flavor after the frost has hit them? That’s what they do here.
Gentlemen,
They tend to survive some freezes fairly well. As long as the temps climb back over freezing by mid morning we are ok. In other words, we need to eat up in the next few days. However, the roots have a good chance of surviving until spring. Perhaps I should bury them in hay.
Michael,
Are you saying that you have written a guide to pruning?
Clem.
Not sure how to put the comment button on that page…working on it. Meanwhile,
I scored today in a out-of-print bookstore:
1. Another turn of the crank (Berry)
2. Liberty Hyde Bailey, an informal biography (Dorf)
3. Agrarian Justice (T. Paine)
4. Letters From An American Farmer (de Crevecoeur)
I’m guessing the score on the agrarian throw-down has seriously gotten out of whack. Do I need to slow down and allow some catch-up?
Cheers,
Well, I should do a better job of listing recent purchases and embellishments to the collection on this end.
For instance:
1. Michigan Board of Agriculture, 1910
2. First Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1889
3. Yearbook of the USDA, 1911 (which fills in nicely between previously held volumes from 1906, 1910 & 1912)… [btw, if you should happen upon a 1907-1909 edition, please advise]
These came on board back in November I believe. I have a similar list from January 2018. At what point do we want to start keeping such a list?
So to really answer your question – should you slow down to allow some catch up… absolutely not. By all means keep the engine fired up and running. [FWIW, from your latest list I like #s 2 and 3 particularly… if you start a lending library, let me know]
And for the comment button – if it becomes an issue don’t fret. Comments can be left here. We’re sentient beings, we’ll figure it out.
Those are some fine additions.
Hijacked!!
Earlier today the intelligence officers at Gulliver’s Pulse unearthed evidence that a certain agrarian from south of the Mason Dixon Line has spirited away still more volumes of agrarian writings [we have spies everywhere]. “He hath thrown down the gauntlet”, said one.
“Patience”, said I, “we might still have a chance!”.
And thus we set off on an adventure. Combing through bins and shelves, shelves and bins; dust and the smell of old paper filled our nostrils. Bookish fellow shoppers dropped ancient tomes to the floor at the sight of such madness. Worried store clerks couldn’t decide whether to call the police or the warden of the local psyche ward. And then, there, in the corner – out of the direct line of a dim cupboard lamp – next to a collection of Hemingway, there it stood. The Farm, by Louis Bromfield. 1933, P.F. Collier and Son, New York. Not autographed… but it would have been worthy of another five paragraphs of this drivel had it been.
Louis would still have been in France at the time he wrote this one. Malabar still awaited the family’s return.
Such is enough of the feigned drama of our after-work assault on our favorite used bookstore. Without further flourish then:
2. Thank You Jeeves, (Wodehouse, 1934)*
3. Animal Breeding, (Winters ,3rd edition, 1947)
4. Raising Small Livestock (Belanger, 1974)
2 is not agrarian, and 1 is only tangentially so.
but 3 and 4 appear to wear the agrarian cache quite nicely.
Back to you.
* perhaps worth note, the proprietor here at SRA is guilty for introducing someone to Wodehouse in the first place.
To the gentleman, from the regions of the old north-west territory, greetings.
We were encouraged upon receiving your latest missive to hear that the light of literacy still burns in those northern climes. We applaud and encourage you in those endeavors. And, indeed, we are greatly excited to hear of your modest acquisitions.
Our own honored efforts in those areas, of removing select tomes from the grasping hands of barbarians who might use them to light cold fireplaces on winter days, has been acknowledged. We thank-you.
A quick perusal of the correspondence and we thought our first edition copy of Pleasant Valley (Bromfield) in jacket, near fine, kindly inscribed by the author, might be missing. But we then realized it was another of the authors works that the correspondent had located. And, though it must be an inferior copy to our own, not owning a copy, we must with much solicitude ask the locations where you obtained this, and the other somewhat modest works mentioned.
It has been our Holy work these many years to secure such tomes as may yet be rescued. Your efforts in this cause will be noted in the next quarterly SRA report. For that information, and indeed we would be obliged if you escorted us to the business from which you obtained these books, upon our next visit, whereupon with much ceremony and celebration, we will gift you the previously mentioned, Ohio Authors and their Books, 1797-1950 (Coyle). Let us be the first to admit that what one would have assumed to be a slight work of modest merit, would total 720 pages. That is until we found in the pages numerous references to cousins and uncles of great and noble name listed. That alone swelled the work from mere pamphlet to serious work of scholarship. It must have been a great loss to the State when that branch removed their persons to Louisiana.
Your humble-ish servant,
Post script: we have sent you visual confirmation of another recent find, located in the town of New Castle, signed by the village scribe who authored said work, by the method involving “texting”.
‘Thank you, Jeeves’ clinched it. There may be rule that ‘That you, Jeeves’ clinches it every time. Whatever it is.
We only need the comma in the title, otherwise it’ll have less strength than a pick-me-up without Wooster sauce.
No, Brian, I have not written one but I own a (digital) one, which a select few are allowed to look at.
Melonsquashville, TN reports a healthy Wode-sonian repository.
To all the cousins, nieces, nephews, great and great-great as necessary, indeed to all the kith and kin of former literary giants of the State of Ohio we wish to impart our most sincere wishes for your peace and prosperity. The literate remnants of this population sorely miss you.
This correspondent would offer that over the course of the now more than 200 years of statehood here on the firmament betwixt the Great Lake Eerie and the northern bank of the Ohio River, this landmass has witnessed a tide of settlement and population growth much out of proportion to the indigenous population it follows. This might be seen by some demographers as salient, but to others a question of the quality of the aforementioned population – at least in regard to their habits of reading – is a quantity ebbing and flowing much like a tide. Certainly many families on this speck of Earth were not merely literate but in some cases very curious and well read. Care for the books in their possession varies all over the waterfront – but to this day it remains possible to discover hundred year old tomes at locations such as Antique Malls, Village historical society events, and the occasional used bookstore.
Our favorite establishment of the ‘used bookstore’ vein here in the middle region of the state, a region close by Franklin County and home to the state’s land grant institution of higher learning, is an enterprise called ‘Half Price Books’. The franchise hosts several stores in this geography, but on the experience of long searching and perusing, this correspondent has found that the two stores in closest proximity to said university tend to yield the best agrarian resources. The theory developed here reflects the notion that as more senior faculty of agricultural disciplines retire, age, and pass from this life, their offspring, less inclined to treasure the books of their forbearers, might be of a mind to market them. Like the intrepid Red Tailed Hawk who scans the prairie for a vole – we steal the occasional moment of leisure to stalk these haunts for a veritable feast. We, like the hawk, sometimes go away hungry. But when successful we gain a peek into a world not easily revealed by more modern literary efforts. Agricultural history seems not to have slaked the curiosities of our urban neighbors, and such treasures rarely demand much coin to purchase.
On the occasion that our most distinguished Southern Correspondent might favor us with a visit to Jeffersonville there is also the Blue Jacket Bookstore in Xenia which could hold a treasure or two. Xenia, being the home to Antioch College, may not rival Columbus for agrarian opportunities, but it will still produce some very old and often very interesting fare.