All in a days work, or 5 hours of pruning. The brush in the truck is tightly bound bundles. The tree is one of several I pruned that day.
Now I’m ready to go home. Will come back the following day.
Another site with older trees.
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We were out mulching until the rain came yesterday.
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That tree is huge! Great shape too.
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There’s a Mac on the site almost double that size- the largest apple tree I’ve ever seen. I think I have a photo of it on my phone- if I do I will post it.
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First tree looks like a model for pruning by ratios.
Photos like this help a ton.
Thanks for sharing Alan. Is day 1 maintenence or re-training after it being let go awhile? I wouldn’t be surprised either way. They are both very nice looking trees.
The big tree I worked on years ago and got fired because the deer were making too much noise eating the apples at night- and he originally said he wanted apples! I got rehired when he sold the place about 7 years ago and I’ve been working on the trees there since. The new owners are lovely people.
The other orchard I’ve been working on for 4 years. The owners father is a billionaire who hired me about 30 years ago at a different estate and fired me after I worked there for 5 years because the crooked manager of the property threatened to quite if he didn’t. They didn’t want to lose his wife who kept their mansion clean and cooked the family’s food. The manager knew that I knew he was robbing the man by hiring incompetent people and taking big kickbacks. However, I didn’t have any leverage to protect myself and was new then to court politics. That orchard must have had about 300 trees and was almost half my workload at the time.
On the site where I photoed my truck I’ve been removing lots of crowding big wood and pulling vigorous uprights below horizontal to replace them with more productive smaller wood. The trees look a lot more graceful and are a lot more productive than when I first came.
The big upright in the middle of the tree in the last photo is a Goldrush graft I put on it about 5 years ago.
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It looks like it’s growing out of the middle of the main trunk. How was it grafted?
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There was a water sprout there and I summer pruned to keep light on it. Now the hard part will be integrating it into a tree that already has too many scaffolds that are too big to remove, at least for this particular client.
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