Garden Centre

Sunday, July 6, 2008

July apple tasks

After all the fun of garden visits, it's down to earth with a bump, or rather, up in the air and hoping not to have a bump!

As regular readers will know, we ‘bonsai’d’ one of our two, extremely ancient, apples trees in January. As a result, there’s nothing to do to that tree this year, it’s just a mass of sappy, suckery branches and although we had some blossom, we won’t be seeing any fruit.

The other tree is a different matter – it’s about eight feet too tall (yes, more than twice the height it should be) so all maintenance has to be done up a tall ladder (damn the previous owners for never pruning the apple trees when they owned the house!) and our main job in July is going to be thinning out the fruits, because left alone, particularly on an old tree, all you get is a huge crop of tiny, bitter, woody apples and probably nothing at all in the following year because the tree is exhausted.

So now the fruits are set, which means you can see tiny apples actually starting to form, we have to get out the ladders and remove the middle apple from each cluster: we start with that one because it will tend to be of the lowest quality and by being squeezed by its outer neighbours often ends up being misshapen. Then we take off any other already blemished and oddly-shaped fruits.

In August we look at the tree again and see if any more thinning is needed.Because our trees are so big and old the branches never need supporting (you could actually hang a swing from them, which is an appalling state for a fruit tree to have got into) but on younger trees it may be necessary in August to support heavily-laden branches with props or get really ruthless with the thinning!

Apples courtesy of Eamonn

Labels: apple trees, july apple tasks, thinning apples

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:52 AM

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