Sharpen up friends! This month we’re pruning! I’m helping you with deciduous fruit trees, berries, grapes, currants, feijoas and avocado’s.
If you haven’t found your pruning feet yet, know that you will. Pruning is a journey!
Be content with becoming familiar with one new thing this winter. Perhaps seeing the framework for the first time, or figuring out the difference between a fruit bud and a leaf bud, or pruning your first big branch out – nice work! Next year you’ll stretch even further and one fine day you’ll go to your trees and know exactly what to do.
Just start, and all is coming.
Yours in the earth + trees,
❤️ Kath
Kia ora Kath, I so appreciate what you do, turning people onto growing and supporting us on our journies!
We planted 70 fruit and nut trees last winter and were blessed with a rainy summer to give them the best chance to grow well. However the cicadas caused so much damage and i had to prune many torn and ragged leaders and newbie scaffold branches after some windy summer spells. I pruned them to the best outward facing buds but it’s very sad to see their stubby arms… We have lots of wekas that are doing a great job eating the emerging cicadas and this year we will free range our chooks, hawks or not! There are many tall trees nearby, mostly not ours, so the problem isn’t going away. I don’t want to use any of the suggested insecticides. Do you have any experience of controlling them organically?
Your beginner’s guide to pruning fruit trees is awesome, thankyou. But i’m not brave enough to try notching, even though i have a Sturmer apple that is resisting scaffolding bar one branch…. We have had so little fine weather to prune, it feels risky. Would it be wise to put pruning paste into the notch?
Thankyou so much for inspiring people to grow their own food and improve their mental health through gardening.
Nga mihi, Iona
Hey Iona, Trees are amazing, resilient and bursting with the life required to repair – they have their own pruning paste! If your tree is in good health, notch away. If you have EM or compost tea on the go, spray that on afterwards to infuse the tree with life giving biology. Good for you for watching the pest predator life cycle and going with it. Nothing can be done to control cicadas without wider implications. Observation, as you are doing – alongside trusting natural processes are your very best tools. Enjoy, Kath
Hi Kath
Do you recommend using some kind of pruning paint on the cuts after pruning?
No I dont. Trees have all the essentials for healing in the same way we do! If there is rot in the tree and the weather is damp, perhaps use a simple beeswax calendula balm to waterproof, but on the whole no.