Terribly Happy: Orchard 5: Other maintenance

Besides watering (Orchard 4 post), orchard maintenance includes many other tasks, including daily routines like looking for gopher activity or obvious tree damage, and seasonal ones like pruning and thinning.

Gophers, moles, and voles (field mice) come with the territory here, and will never be fully eradicated. In fact, the gophers and moles provide a service by aerating the soil….which is fine as long as they aren’t also nibbling through roots, or providing routes for voles to girdle (eat the bark all the way around) the base of young trees. So I try to control them.

First, you have to recognize the signs of their activity. Gophers and moles make slightly different holes and leave slightly different mounds of dug-up soil. When I find several mounds like this, I know gophers around.

I find a freshly dug hole and mound, excavate the hole using a weeding trowel, and insert a Cinch trap like this one.

Cinch trap in a dug-out gopher hole.

I caught about 25 gophers combined in 2010 and 2011, including this guy. Check out those teeth!

Perhaps I scared them away (?!)—just two gophers and a single mole in 2012. Or maybe they were impressed by the massive excavation in August 2011, when I dug out about 25 feet of underground runways, set traps about 50 times with no success, and finally killed the darn things with poison. Sigh.

Pruning has a learning curve, and it helps to have an expert guide or watch you in person as you learn. Heiko Koester is such an expert, and I’ve consulted with him about many aspects of the orchard and forest garden, not just pruning.

Beth made us stage this one!

In our area, pruning season typically runs from December to February, while the plants are dormant. Isolated pruning may be necessary at other times—a broken branch, an outbreak of disease, etc.

My pruning tools include ladders, loppers, and a folding pruning saw. My long arms help, too, though my torn rotator cuff doesn’t. One of the best purchases I made here was an orchard ladder.

Extraordinarily stable, lightweight considering it’s 14’ long, and very maneuverable. For now I only use it on the tall mature trees like the old apples (above) and the walnut,

but as the years pass and the orchard trees grow, I’ll need it there, too.

Another major task in a fruit orchard is thinning the fruitlets in the spring. If conditions are nice, the tree will “set” so much fruit that, left untended, the crop will consist of lots of undersized, usually less-than-desirable fruit. Also, branches can break from the weight of so much fruit. So in spring, you get out there and snip away!

It’s tough: you’re basically snuffing out the life of young’uns, but c’est la vie. Here are before and after pix. There were four apple-wannabees. After looking them over for blemishes, wormholes, etc., I selected the survivor and snipped away the other three.

Before: Four little guys who want to grow up to be an apple.

After: Only one survived the scissors.

They’re small,

and there are lots of them, so it might take all day to thin a large tree, but it’s worth it at harvest time. Our fruit were, on average, twice as large as they were last year, tasted better, and had far fewer pest and disease problems.