Recycling Fruit Tree Prunings...
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...