The Internet seems quieter this week. Fewer tweets, not so much fussing with Facebook. Websites down for maintenance. Bloggers resting after the holiday rush of doing and making. It feels good to stop. To cut back.
I took advantage of the break between bruising rainstorms and pruned my dwarf Blenheim Apricot tree. (A couple weeks early, I believe.) It’s only two years old, so the cuts were drastic. There will be no fruit this summer — or next, for that matter — but this is the price of helping a young tree grow strong enough to bear good fruit in later years.
This is a wonderful little book: How to Prune Fruit Trees, by R. Sanford Martin. It was published in 1944 and has been reprinted more than twenty times since. It’s a slender thing, but it contains very specific directions for pruning trees and vines from Almond to Youngberry — and pretty much everything in between. I started out feeling like the guy on the cover, but the book put me and my loppers at ease. It’s absolutely worth searching out at the library or any place that sells used books. My local nursery had a few copies for sale.
Pruning. Dreaming. Taking notes. Making lists. What will the new year bring?
