With the first proper freeze of the winter come and gone the winter orchard pruning season is well and truly open in Ireland. I tend to the orchard care needs of customers in Cork and Kerry, and sometimes further afield in counties Limerick and Clare.
My interest in the care of fruit trees goes back to over 20 years ago when I was a curious teenager and I have tended to hundreds of orchards since turning professional back in 2016. Some pruning jobs involve a few small trees in a domestic garden while other jobs can involve tending to centuries old orchards on the grounds of old estates.
Holistic Orchard Care
While there are general rules and concepts that apply to all apple trees, each one is also a unique individual with its own personal history. Because of this I treat each one according to its own circumstances, history and health condition: I have an holistic approach to orchard care.
Natural Orchard Pruning
Although I have taken a number of courses on orchard care and fruit tree grafting, my biggest orchard care influence is Masanobu Fukuoka who was a pioneer of natural farming in Japan. He is most famous for his direct seeding system of rice growing in an unploughed field using no herbicides or pesticides to grow crops matching the best yields in his district. However his lesser known observations on natural fruit growing are probably more valuable to the growers in Ireland, where there are many fruit trees but no rice cultivation. His main concept regards aiming for a naturally shaped tree which will require less and less maintenance each year rather then more maintenance as is sometimes the case with the conventional systems that train trees into forms that are unnatural for the wild forms of the particular species.
To find out what this is like you can read this article, or get in touch here to get professional care for your trees.
Apple Tree Pruning Workshops and Courses
If you are interested in learning how to winter prune your own orchard I would love to teach you how at one of my orchard care courses in the new year, date to be announced. I list all courses here. To stay abreast of these announcements sign-up for email updates and never miss out on orchard care, permaculture and sustainability skills courses.
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My first question is why?
Why are the.trees not shaping themselves naturally?
Someday i will love to.take this class, am on another begining track now..to get an office and do cranial sacral,trauma relief and quantum field clearing sessions! Blessings
Hi Claire,
Thanks for your comment.
“My first question is why?
Why are the trees not shaping themselves naturally?”
That’s a great question. It goes deeper than most books go on the matter of pruning and it is the exact question I asked myself many years ago.
Fundamentally trees grown from seed will grow to a natural shape by themselves. Trees that are grafted however, or trees that have already been pruned will have had their natural hormones and growing pattern interfered with, and will need more work to restore a natural pattern of growth.
Every time we deviate from nature’s pattern there we make work for ourselves. It can be argued however whether or not it’s worthwhile. In this case, through grafting, we get to perpetuate the amazing varieties of fruit that come along, but it will cause us some pruning work afterwards.
I’ve come to a happy relationship with the pruning work so for me it is worth it in this case.
I go into it somewhat here in this article:
https://permaculturedesign.ie/2024/07/22/summer-pruning-espaliered-apples-and-pears/
and in this one:
https://permaculturedesign.ie/orchard-pruning-cork/
And there’s another one on the way.
Thanks for reading and commenting
Best,
Paul