How NOT To Take Down A Damson Tree...

So with winter nearing it's end I still had one more tree job to complete this year - to take down a damson tree and replace it with a pear. 

I planted this tree ten years ago and it has reverted back to it's rootstock and never produced any fruit. So I decided enough was enough and it was time to take it out. I had purchased a Black Worcester Pear to go in it's place, on a big rootstock, so I needed to get a move on before it started to grow where I had healed it in. 

I wanted the pear to go in pretty much where the damson had been though, and I knew if I just cut it down the damson would sucker like mad and throw up lots of shoots. So I took the drastic measure of pushing it out with the digger. 

 

Hopefully this new tree will establish quickly and grow well. I couldn't quite believe the growth of the damson over the last ten years - you could almost grow that for a timber tree! I've put the trunk and big branches to one side and hopefully I'll make something from it later in the year. Damson is a lovely wood to work with. 

Watch the video above and let me know what you think. 

Pear Rust

Walking around the orchard the other day, whist snuffling apples with the girls, I noticed orange spots on my pear trees

I knew straight away what it was - Pear Rust.

But it got me thinking, it's only meant to be able to complete it's life cycle with a juniper bush and I've not seen any close by. I'll have to keep an eye out when visiting neighbours in future as it's a shame to have my pear trees affected by this. Apparently if you remove and burn affected leaves from the juniper you can help reduce the rust on your pear trees, hopefully breaking the cycle and getting rid of it. I don;t think it's too detrimental to the tree but it can cause canker which will weaken the tree.

Anyone else have pear rust on their trees? 

What's the worst thing affecting your fruit trees this autumn?

More Fruit Tree Pruning (Sorry!)

On Thursday I worked for my mum. Every few weeks she has the children for a day and I attack her massive list of jobs. I know who is more tired at the end of the day though and it's not me! 

She did dangle the proverbial "carrot on the end of the stick" for me though and said that once I got so many of the jobs done could I prune our orchard.

I've mentioned this orchard before, it's one I planted with her about 10 years ago on the farm, before I left home. Full of old varieties and some tried and tested favourites of apples, pears, plums quinces, damsons, gages & medlars. There must be about 40 trees in there now and I try to prune it every year if I get around to it. 

The "new" orchard on the farm. The old orchard is very old and used to park machinery now, so 10 years ago my mother and I decided to plant another one for the future.

This tree is starting to have the goblet shape that I want

Much larger prunings were required on some trees 

 It's been interesting seeing the shapes of the tree forming and some I'm getting right whilst others need quite a bit more work to them. I won't go through the process here, as I know I'm a bit boring when it comes to pruning fruit trees, so I thought I'd just show a few pictures. 

The photos below are a before and after of a tree I'm trying to bring back down. It still needs plenty taking off it but that's plenty for this year, with some big branches marked up for next year as well. Hopefully in about three years I should have the shape I want on this tree

Before - far too much upright growth and lots of canker in the branches

After - reduced the height and removed one of the large limbs that was growing too vertical.

Sorry if I keep boring everyone with fruit trees and pruning - I'm sure they'll be more posts about it yet though!

Fruit Tree Pruning Talk

I had a phone call from my mum on Monday inviting me to a talk at her gardening club. It was on fruit trees by a very knowledgeable nursery man so I decided to drive the thirty or so miles and go to the talk, my brother met me there as well.

I've not been to many gardening clubs before, but lets just say that if you added the age of my brother and me together we'd still be younger than most there! We were given a warm welcome though and the speaker was excellent.

His name is Nick Dunn and he runs the nursery that I visited the year before last and he is also the author of the book "Trees for your garden" which is excellent.

His talk was brilliant (no photos sorry) he brought in many trees with him and cut them all up into how he's start different forms and shapes. Although I've been on many fruit tree pruning courses and talks before I still learnt a lot from this. He was truly passionate about it and seemed very happy to be talking to my brother and me at the end as he could see we were a younger generation interested in it.

A few random tips I wrote down are:

• Prune hard when you plant - This si something I never do but he was taking quite a bit of growth off, by half on the one tree. He says to be brave and the tree will grow a lot stronger because of it. It seems counter-intuitive but I'm going to adopt this practice and see how I get on. 

• Tie cherry tree branches downwards or break them slightly - any growth going upwards produces vegetative buds but downwards will produce fruit buds. Break them when the spa is rising.

• Bend and tie the trees into an S bend to slow the spa rising and to produce more fruit. Also some orchards are planting closer and closer together to increase competition. 

• Try to pick out branches that are a wide angle from the main trunk. they use toothpick like things to space them on some orchards now as it will mean a much stronger branch in the future. remove narrow angle branches as they tend to want to grow upwards.

• Summer pruning - I thought it was tricky to work out when but he says after the longest day you're good to go, although you might have to prune twice if they put on lots of growth.

• Figs - Prune in early autumn or summer, not in winter like I would have assumed. 

• To prevent peach leaf curl you need to stop the rain falling on the leaves until the end of may. Give the tree a cover until then that is open to the sides.

My mother keeps on to me to do some talks for gardening clubs? What do you think I could do them on? Could you do a talk to a club and what would it be on?

A Days Pruning

I was flattered last week when my brother asked me to go on a days pruning with him as he actually wanted to use some of my knowledge of fruit trees - as you all know I'm a little obsessed! I was keen and it turned out to be a really nice day, we worked hard and got a lot done and I'm really pleased with the results. 

A beautiful little smallholding with a great layout. 

 It was on a little smallholding next door to my parents farm, none of the trees had been touched for a few years as the current owners hadn't been living there long. We were concentrating on the apple and pear trees in the front garden, the house is located in the middle of the plot so the front is almost as big as the back and there was quite few trees to work on. 

Opening up a young tree creating much more light in the middle

 There was a nice mix of young and old trees to deal with, the youngest about eight or ten years going up to 30 years plus. I set to work on the small trees whilst my brother tackled the bigger ones. We were pruning for fruit production, so trying to create trees that are light and airy in the middle (a goblet shape), pruning all diseased and crossing branches first then starting to shape them. As these hadn't been touched for so long we couldn't remove too much wood this year, instead reducing some of the growth and overcrowding with a plan on tackling it again next year. If you try to take too much in one go then it puts too much energy into growing new wood instead of fruit, that's when you get lots of water shoots (quick growing upright growth).

A overcrowded small tree before pruning

Dave doing some more major work in one of the older trees

Before

After - more work to thin it out again next year.

It's fun working with my brother and he's a master of all tree work so I always learn something, but it was nice that he trusted me on what I was doing and when he's up in the tree he took my direction as it's especially difficult for him to tell the overall shape of the tree when he's in it. The last one was particularity horrible with a wild rose climbing up all through it, I didn't envy him as it was bad enough pulling the wood out and putting it in the chipper, it must have been much worse getting scratched to pieces in the tree!

An enjoyable days work and the weather was great as well, really cold but we were both dressed right so it didn't bother us in the slightest and instead enjoyed what little winter sunshine there was. 

Grafting Success and Failures

I grafted more fruit trees this year than the year before and I had a fair few more failures.

This years tree nursery - a little weedy maybe...

 The apples did relatively well although I only had a success rate of around 75%, I think this is down to a number of factors: I used some "grafting pliers" for some for the grafts and the majority of these ones failed compared to the ones I did traditionally with a knife. I also stored the scion wood differently, some in the fridge (this all took well) and some in the shed, as it was much more mild than the year before, I don't think the shed was cold enough and so some of the wood wasn't alive enough to be grafted.

One of the many failed cherry grafts

 Some for the other fruit didn't do so well. Only two cherry grafts took and much the same with the plums and pears, although the two apricots I did as an experiment are both doing well. 

A successful graft with apricot wood

In total I've still got over a hundred fruit trees growing in the nursery with successful grafts and the root stocks that had failed grafts on can be used this next spring so no money lost. Next year I will trying budding some trees in the summer (although there never seems time in August) as I think stone fruit like the cherries and plums do better that way.

Has anyone else been propagating fruit trees or tried their hand at grafting?

Fruit Tree Nursery 2014

Last weekend I finally managed to finish grafting and planting all of my fruit trees.

 I planted them in two separate beds quite close together to try to encourage them to grow straight and true. I 've also experimented a little bit as one lot was planted through some old weed suppressant matting I had left from ages ago and the other will be mulched with straw

In these two little beds is hopefully my future cider orchard, some apricots and nectarines to see if I can get them to grow in our cold spot, cherries so we can have delicious stone fruit in the summer, plums and pears to grow around the veg garden and some more apple trees to grow and sell.

140 in total this year, should be interesting to see how they do.

Did anyone else get round to doing any grafting this year?

Stone Fruit & Pear Grafted

I feel much better now I've started to do this years grafting.

Today I managed to graft all my cherry, plum and pear rootstock's.

Some of the completed grafts

The cherries have been grafted with a few older varieties  like "Van" and "morrollo" then some more modern ones like "Summers Sun" and "penny". I only did ten trees as the dwarfing rootstock's I wanted weer quite expensive. I plan to plant all of these, when they've left the nursery bed, in the orchard, quite close together so they can be netted easily.

The 15 pears were a good selection of what I could find locally, from the basic but lovely "Conference" to the more unusual "Court du Lame" (I've just googled this one and found nothing so maybe I've written it down wrong) and I also grafted a medlar on one as well.

The plum rootstock's were used for 4 different varieties of plum and also an apricot "Novi Sad" and nectarine "Lord Napier". These more warm climate fruit should give me a bit of a challenge in years to come (anyone have any luck with apricots over here or am I just dreaming?)!

I set myself up in the greenhouse just in case it rains...

Turned out to be a good plan - shame I put the washing out to dry first thing!

All the grafted trees waiting for their nursery bed to be dug over ready.

For the grafts I used the whip and tongue graft (Have a look in my blog here, here and here for more information on grafting) but I must confess to using insulation tape to secure them together, as the ones I did with it last year seem to work just as well as the ones done using proper grafting tape and wax, I guess time will tell on that one.

So that's 40 grafts down just 100 apple tree grafts to go! Anyone else grafting this year?

Rootstocks Have Arrived

My "big" order of fruit tree rootstocks has arrived.

A big bundle of rootstocks

 For me this is quite a big order of 100 MM106 apple rootstocks, 15 Quince A rootstocks, 10 "gisela 5" cherry rootstocks and 15 plum root stocks. I have heeled them into the veg garden to leave until the end of winter when I'll graft them.

I was pleased with the qualitity of the stock as I took a gamble and ordered online from a supplier I hadn't used before. The plants all have good roots on them and look healthy which is a good sign

All heeled in

The only trouble is I ordered a little scion wood to go with the order (Apricot and a couple of different plums) and I'm not sure the best way to store this until March. Some research needed unless you guys have some advice?