Trees: Planting & Pruning

Trees: Planting & Pruning
by Diana Greenwood Mead
February 3, 2009

http://www.supermarketguru.com/index.cfm/go/sg.viewArticle/articleId/271

For the past few weeks I have enjoyed writing about the pleasures of home grown food – from first thoughts about a few salads and a pot or two of tomatoes, to the more serious commitments of fruit bushes and vines. I think it’s time to talk about the friends that will be with you for a long time – the fruiting trees.
Apples, pears, plums, apricots, peaches, figs, nectarines, bananas, walnuts, pecans, oranges & lemons – the list is endless (as is the delight of fruit, sweet from your own tree) and depending where you live, the right varieties can be easily found at specialist nurseries, often with detailed instructions for their planting and care.
There are some fruit tree varieties (particularly apples, pears and peaches) that have been bred to remain small, and while these won’t necessarily provide you with a full supply of fruit, the fact that they can be grown in containers adds to their charms.
Fruit trees, once they have reached fruiting size, benefit from pruning (trimming) to keep them in a good useful shape and to maximise the quantity of fruit which can be harvested.
Detailed information on how to prune various trees is very complex, but it’s based on common sense - keeping the trees in a nice shape to stand up to wind and weather, cutting off branches that cross others and could rub bark off allowing disease to get into the tree, cutting out overcrowded branches and so on.
The best way to learn how to do this is probably from a book or on the web – there’s a wealth of information at www.tree-pruning.com.

To read the full article: http://www.supermarketguru.com/index.cfm/go/sg.viewArticle/articleId/271