01/03/2023: Orchard Afternoon at Dorich House Museum

 

Back at Dorich House Museum with the Orchard Project and KUBAG volunteers giving our fruit trees some TLC

We started March with a return to Dorich House museum with the Orchard Project. Counting back the years I realised i was 4 years since we were last on site in  February 2019! So our trees were definitely due some TLC. 

We found we had one unfortunate casualty, in that we had lost another of our old trees a Cox's Pomona, most likely it was lost during last years drought. Normally old established fruit trees on a good non-dwarfing root-stock should survive periods of drought given the depth of their roots. But it may have been a combination of the weather and the age of this tree. 

The Cox's Pomona variety was raised by Mr Richard Cox of Colnbrook, Slough, Buckinghamshire in 1825. It is thought to be the seedling sister to the famous Cox's Orange Pippin. So the story goes, Mrs Cox observed a bee foraging on an apple tree, marked the apple then later sowed its pips. Two trees survived to become known as Cox's Orange Pippin and Cox's Pomona. Although it can be eaten fresh from the tree, it is generally used as a cooking apple.

True apple trees can't be grown from seed, so to grow a particular variety it has to be cloned by taking a cutting of the original. This cutting is grafted onto root-stocks which determine the size of the mature tree along with the management it undergoes.  An apple tree left to its own devices could stand 30-40ft high 

For our lost tree, we are lucky that its still standing and providing a fantastic standing wood habitat that is host to a good range of lichens and mosses as well as invertebrates. .So we are planning on retaining it at the moment as standing dead wood until we figure out the best replacement tree species for this location. They say its best not to plant the same type to minimise infections so no apples in this space again and definitely not the same variety. Maybe its might be time to explore a peach tree, given that the climate conditions are suitable for more certainty for fruiting nowadays! 

Lewis from the Orchard Project took us through the orchard, describing the trees for the volunteers and explaining the difference between the different types of pruning that we would be undertaking -  restorative pruning, renewal pruning and formative pruning. 

Then the teams were let loose, practising first with restorative pruning:

1. working out which branches to trim back to maximise triggering the trees to grow better, 

2. see where previous years work had helped create new branches which could be used as new structural branches, 

3. work out which branches and side growth could be removed without shocking the tree into panic growth.

We worked to a few common rules:

1. The rule of thirds (never cut a branch back to another branch which is less then 2/3rds of the size of the branch being removed); 

2. the rule of  not randomly cutting a branch in the middle of said branch (which often results in branches just dying back to a union point, with the larger dead material, being a source of infections entering the tree) and 

3.Never take out more then 20 % of growth from the tree's canopy in any one year. 

This page on the Orchard Project's site takes about some of the different types of pruning in more detail.

After each team worked on one of the mature apple and pear trees, we then looked at the young trees on the site. These trees had already undergone formative pruning to get the desired shape of the tree in the first 5-9 years (this is a longer time then normal as trees normally undergo this in the first 3-4 years in the ground, but it took a long time for these trees to put on any growth on our site, so we had to wait a while before starting). The pruning now being undertaken was the renewal pruning, just ensuring that we keep monitoring the shape of the tree, and select branches to remove which may cause congestion in the heart of the canopy, where we want sunlight to hit. This sort of pruning isn't needed each year, so its great for sites where we use a light touch to keep our trees healthy. 

The image below shows the difference between a fruit bud and a leaf bud. Winter pruning as we were doing at our event - encourages vigour in a tree, where as summer pruning encourages fruiting.

If you happen to have a stone fruit tree (cherries, nectarines peaches etc.) then you shouldn't prune when its too cold as you can negatively impact the tree. Lewis' memory aid for this is never prune in a month with the letter R in it for a stone fruit - so only May, June, July, and August! - so we'll have to go back to the Orchard at some point in May to do some work on the nectarine that was planted back in 2012.  

Lewis also talked about grafting briefly - The photos below are from one of the previous events where root stock was brought to the site. At our site the only sampling that had some formative pruning was the Michelson's Seedling Apple which was a cultivar that was developed in the Kingston Area. Lewis took the cutting from this tree as he said that the green wood cutting would still be fine for a few days/weeks if stored properly, if stored properly, and would be ideal for the grafting workshop that the Orchard Project ran a few weeks later. 

And lastly we undertook some halo pruning around the old mulberry tree on our site. the health of the tree was already improved by removing some self-seeded poplars which were impacting the canopy to the north of the tree, and then shaping the existing bay shrub to the right height to ensure the lower canopy was clear. We also took out one of the over extended branches of the mulberry to ensure that the tree was slowly pushing the growing efforts into the new growth that it was putting out.  What's interesting was that one of the overextended branches that we concentrated on removing which appeared dead from the ground, was still alive in one half of the branch on the upper surface of the branch as it was out of view. We had wanted to remove this branch anyway, but its something to bear in mind if you are doing works, to ensure that the branches that you are removing from any tree of this age, is done in a considered fashion, to ensure that you don't accidentally remove something that you might want to retain to encourage restorative growth in a particular part of the canopy. 

That's it for this year at the Orchard. We should be back in 2 years to do the next TLC session at this site.

Take care til then