Pruning trees and bushes
Some information that will hopefully give you confidence to care for your own fruit trees and or bushes.
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Why I Prune Fruit Trees
If you have a fruit tree, you should prune it. I have learned this through personal experience. The first time we pruned my grandparents trees we had a bunch of family come and help. We were only planning on staying for one semester (ha ha, so much for plans) and it had been a few years since the trees had been pruned. I figured I would learn a lot. I was totally shocked when my family members started asking my opinion on which branches to cut. I quickly realized how clueless I really was. When we didn’t end up moving out at the end of the semester I decided I…
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Our Great Peach Tree
Our peaches this year were glorious! My grandma has like eight peach trees. I really like peaches, but I have to say, more than two or three peach trees is probably too many. However, in my grandma’s defense, there are only one or two of each variety. There are early peaches, one white peach tree, some regular free-stone orange peaches, and some cling-stone peach trees. The cling-stone trees are worthless to me. They are the last to ripen and the hardest to use. I hate to even give them away, at least not to friends; they might not stay my friends. There is however, one peach tree that stands above…
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Bringing forth good fruit
My grandma’s orchard has five apple trees, but I normally only think of four of them. The fifth has not been producing very well in the five years we have been here. It puts on apples but not very many and they got wormy and soft really early. I was ready to cut this tree down. Luckily my husband is more considerate of my grandparent’s feelings. My grandma loves every plant in her yard. And it is still her property, we are just trying to help her take care of it. So he endorsed just pruning it well and watching to see what happened. Which we did. Sadly this tree…
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Reviving Raspberries
This raspberry patch has given me a lot of grief. When we moved in over half of the patch was barely even producing. There was grass growing throughout, and most of the stalks were less than 3′ tall. In my online research I learned how to prune or plant raspberries but I didn’t find anything about this particular issue. So I thought I would share my experience so far. We thought about taking everything out and starting with a new variety. But my grandparents always talk about how they got half of the starts from my grandma’s sister Aunt Ann. The other half they got from Bear Lake area which…
