Garden Centre

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The long and the short of it . . .

OH is pruning the apple trees. One of the problems with being a sentimental gardener is that nothing good ever gets removed so the best never gets a chance. These apple trees are the bane of my life and if I’d been a different kind of gardener – the sensible kind – they would no longer exist. What I should have done, if I’d had any sense, was to hire a tree surgeon to visit the house in the week before I moved in and take them out, roots and all. But OH loved them as soon as he saw them, despite the fact that they are huge, unwieldy and unproductive. So they stayed.

I say they are unproductive, but while one gave us about five apples this year, the other, in a bumper year for fruit, decided to produce about 50 kilos of large, pappy, blemished apples which it then deposited on our next door neighbour’s flat garage roof. I’ve gingerly tiptoed around up there, trying to remove them all via a bucket and rope system (all a bit Heath Robinson) but their garage still smells like cider vinegar and I feel guilty.

And then there’s the winter pruning – every year the trees put on vast upward-facing growth that supports little or not fruit (apart from the one tree that had a joke with us this year) and which has to be pruned out or it shades the entire garden. So OH has been clambering up the ladder every day over the holidays to thin out the growth. And I am looking at the heap of apple prunings (and bits of iceberg rose, which is definitely the best thing about that apple tree) and defiantly not picking them up and doing anything tidy with them.

Still, the rosa mundi will be happier for the extra light … if it doesn’t end up being destroyed by having rose clippings, a stepladder and/or a substantial OH land on it.

Labels: iceberg rose, pruning apple trees, winter pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:13 AM

---