Garden Centre

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Today’s garden

Looks a bit of a mess – the apple tree has had drastic remedial surgery and the whole garden looks like it was hit by a hurricane. The skip is filled to the brim, the compost bin ditto, and the idea of clearing all this up is enough to make me want to emigrate. But things WILL get better.

Of course it feels awful to hack the tree down so hard, but it’s a kill or cure scenario – this year it produced exactly four apples and it shades two thirds of the lawn for most of the day, meaning our grass has become weak. Apple trees aren’t meant to be giants – the rule of thumb (that good old gardener’s rule of thumb that gets called on for everything from planting to composting) is that you should be able to reach the highest apple on the highest branch from a stepladder. You couldn’t reach the highest branch of our tree (not that it had any apples on it) from a two level scaffold! In addition, the trees are old, probably sixty years old, and elderly fruit trees have a tendency to rot from the point where the largest branches join the trunk, meaning that they can be very unstable – large unstable branches are not a good thing to have in a garden that copes with gale force winds!

Still, I keep telling myself it will be okay, in six months we won’t recognise the poor thing, but I wince every time I step outside and see it …

Labels: apple trees, summer pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:19 AM

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