Before pruning, and after

What’s Growing This Week:  Carrots  Spinach Satsuma Mandarins Leeks Butternut Apples Navel Oranges Broccoli (M, L) Collards (M, L) Green garlic (L)            All items are in all box sizes,unless marked

A SNIP HERE, A SNIP THERE
Pruning is the art of shaping a living plant.  It consists of two primary activities — cutting off certain branches, and leaving others.  Like many other things we do in farming, pruning is not a 21st century concept.  It involves destroying to create, and it requires long-term planning, patience, and experience.  It offers no instant gratification.

Winter is the season for pruning in Northern California, and as Terra Firma has expanded our orchards, we now have a considerable amount of trees, of a number of different fruits, that need trimming each year.  Apricots, peaches, apples, pears, persimmons, and nectarines must all be pruned every year.  Left unpruned, these trees initially produce too much fruit, which does not size up and usually causes multiple limbs to break.  Eventually, most unpruned trees of these types will stop producing fruit entirely.  Each type has very specific growth habits that must be taken into consideration:  pruning an apple tree the same way you prune an apricot tree is almost as bad as not pruning at all.

 Cherries, pistachios, and walnuts don’t require pruning each year, but must periodically be trimmed to keep them to a certain shape and size, and to keep new wood growing.  That’s right — most trees (not just fruit and nut trees) respond to the act of pruning by sending out more new growth than they would otherwise.

Another critical type of pruning is done to young trees that have not yet begun bearing fruit.  During the first two to five years of a young tree’s life, the pruner must make critical decisions about what the tree is going to look like.  Right now, I am in the process of pruning the peach trees that we planted in April of 2006.  After planting, the trees grew quickly and vigorously, producing an abundance of branches and in some cases getting as tall as 8 ft. and up to 10 ft. in diameter.

 There are various shapes and sizes that one can choose to grow a peach tree.  In a tightly spaced orchard, each tree might have just 2 main branches, growing perpendicular to the tree row.  On our rich soil, we decided to go with a wider spacing that would allow bigger trees, each consisting of 3-4 main branches.  Peach trees must always have an open center, so that light can reach the trunk, otherwise the fruit-bearing branches will die.  But young peach trees produce a solid bush with the strongest branches almost always growing straight up out of the center. The first step, then, in pruning a young peach tree is to destroy the single biggest, strongest branch is has produced.  In fact, the pruning process can remove 50% or more of the new wood that the little trees have grown.  In the process of selecting three or four well-spaced branches (called scaffolds), it is not uncommon to remove 6 or even 8 other large branches.  Then cuts are made to the remaining scaffolds.  All the side branches that are growing towards the center of the tree are removed, as are any branches growing downwards.  If two branches are crossing (or will end up crossing in the future) one is removed.  If the main branch splits in two directions, any upward or inward growth is normally removed.  The idea is to keep the tree growing up at roughly a 45 degree angle.

 The “before and after” pruning of a young peach tree is dramatic, as you can see in the photos on the website.  Many people who have seen the orchard growing through the summer gasp.  Making these types of “cuts” to the trees one has nurtured is hard, but not if you can visualize what the trees will look like in the future.

 For me, pruning is a mental exercise that has other applications in life.  In building a business such as ours, one continually has to make tough decisions based both on past experience and a future vision.  Many of these decisions, like cuts with a pruning shears, don’t have an “undo” option or a “rewind” arrow.  At the same time, failure to make certain decisions at the right time can cause untold problems down the road as you are forced to live with the consequences.  Bad decisions can also lead to problems that stay around for many years.   Fixing a badly pruned tree is always far more time consuming and costly than doing it right in the first place.  And the satisfaction of doing right the first time lasts a long, long time.

IN YOUR BOXES
My appreciation one for leafy green has grown substantially in the last week, as much of the spinach we have planted appears to have weathered the cold admirably.  If you had asked me before the freeze “which is more cold-hard:  spinach or chard/beet greens”, I would have chosen the latter.  Yet the opposite appears true.  I have to give props on this matter to our new seed supplier, who has gone to great lengths to find us good winter spinach varieties.  A crop that is grown almost every day of the year somewhere in California, spinach is expected to grow just as well in the long days of summer as the short days of winter, and in the cool, foggy summers of Salinas as well as the dry hot falls of the Central Valley.  Not surprisingly, plant breeders have developed dozens of varieties, each with a particular geographic, climatic, or seasonal niche.

A “winter spinach” grown in the warm January weather of the Imperial Valley deserts is not going to perform well here at our farm at that time.  Nor is a “summer spinach” grown on the coast.  Then there is the issue of mildew, the primary “pest” of spinach.  Breeders are in a race to develop resistant varieties faster than the mold can evolve, and it gets harder the more widely planted and consumed spinach gets.

 Terra Firma currently uses 8 or 9 different spinach varieties.  Five are “flat leaf”, which we use for our baby spinach, and four are “savoy” or curly leaf, which we use in our salad mix.  One of those varieties is only for planting in January — planted any other month, and it will flower before producing edible leaves.  Two others are planted only in September and May — they grow far too slowly otherwise, yet stay sweet and tender in the heat.
 The spinach we are currently harvesting is a beautiful deep, dark green color, despite the cold weather that would make even reasonably winter-hardy varieties turn yellow.  It’s name?  “Polarbear”
 

Thanks,
    Pablito
 

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Recipes............................

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