Backyard Farmgals

Crabapple. My tree is blooming.  I walked out to it today to smell it and looked up to see and hear more bees than I could count humming away gathering pollen and nectar.  I inhaled and smiled, this tree is so fragrant.  I almost ripped out this tree when we first bought our house.  It had more suckers than tree and was scraggly and undernourished.  I think you would agree that it is a good thing we decided to keep it.  People drive down our road to see it every spring.  It is absolutely beautiful and all it needed was some pruning and fertilizer.  Like most things in life with a little love, ugly and seemingly lifeless things can become the most radiant.   This will be my last bloom with this tree because we just sold our house.  It sold really fast, the first day we put it on the market, to the first person who walked through.  So fast!  I am not quite ready to say goodbye, I love my house and I adore my gardens. ...

Weezer... helper goat and knowledgable pruning specialist If you haven't started your spring pruning, there is no time like this weekend to get busy with it.  I am taking an arboriculture class and have been thrust into the fiery furnace of pruning so to speak.  We were given an assignment to prune five different types of woody plants and take pictures.  We had to spend a total of 10 hours, which ended up being a lot of trees for me because I do have some experience.  I thought I would share what I did as well as pictures for those of you who feel like I did a few years ago, not knowing where to start. There are some general rules to follow.  With fruit trees, I alway start with water sprouts.  They are those horrible long vertical shoots that come back year after year.  While I am pruning water sprouts, I am looking for anything dead, diseased, or broken.  All of these things I prune out as I go. I prune out any suckers at the base of the t...

  You all know that Spring is the time for pruning fruit trees.  We have 17 apple trees on the microfarm, plus an apricot and cherry.  We also have a pear and another apple at the house.  All of these trees means far too many things to prune and take to the green waste at the dump.  I could take 5 or 6 trailer loads of just tree prunings to the the green waste each Spring.  That's a lot of time, energy, and money in gas and entrance fees to the dump.  We devised a way to reduce our waste that really benefits us on the farm. As the trees are pruned, we sort through the piles of branches.  (We had someone really terrible prune our trees and we are now paying for it with overgrowth on the trees, so when I say piles of branches, I mean PILES.  Lesson to be learned: take a class or two and learn to do it yourself, it isn't very hard.)  The watershoots are the vertical straight growth from the previous year that doesn't produce fru...