Friday Hands-on

Fruit Tree Pruning, Compost-Building & Grafting Lessons

Today, for the second half of class after lunch, we met in the Southwest corner outside of the Sustainable Living Building by the pear trees. We divided the class into 3 groups and each group rotated between learning how to prune fruit trees with guest specialist Avi, building a hot compost pile with Doug or learning how to do fruit tree grafting with Brian.

Avi with the pruners, and JenTi in the back.

My group first gathered around a pear tree with Avi  and after hearing him give us a general sense of how we should go about pruning the tree in front of us, (and other fruit trees in general), we began making cuts to the tree. The main idea I went away from this lesson is to have a plan with your pruning. Know the general ideas: Are you going to have a central leader, or is your plan to have no central leader, but instead to employ the training style that Brian showed us on Wednesday at his house, to train your tree to have an open middle, with branches spreading out from a center point?

Stand back from the tree and get a sense of the entire being-ness of it and notice where there is codominance, crossing branches, or any other branches that should be removed for other reasons, like they won't get enough light or they will be draining energy from the tree in not useful ways, like with suckering. Suckering is when new shoots spring out from the base of the tree, and in the case of our tree today, Avi could tell that the sucker our pear tree had was one-year old wood. Since the pear tree bears fruit on second year old wood, the first cut we decided to make was to remove the sucker that would not be producing fruit and would only be a burden to the energy of the tree. We made a few other cuts, like to do a heading cut on one of the central leaders, because the tree grew with two central leaders of very similar size. Making a heading cut on one will distinguish the other as the central leader, which gives us a base for the rest of the trimming.

This was my second fruit-tree pruning lesson, and I absolutely love pruning fruit trees! It is very clear to me that it is a beautiful art and skill to cultivate. Learning the biology of trees and practicing seeing the tree in a holistic way has been one of the most satisfying aspects about my studies in the Sustainable Living department so far.


Hot Compost Piling

From Left: Kathy, Doug & Soangela

I was very excited to participate in creating a compost pile for the first time when my group moved on from fruit tree pruning to building hot compost with Doug. The carbon material we used was straw and browned leaves, the green material was freshly mown grass, and the nitrogen material was horse manure. The ratio of carbon to green to nitrogen is 50-40-10. We put layer upon layer and once the materials were laid out, we would hand mix them with the materials of the previous layer. I believe the layering order we went in was brown, green, then manure. As Doug mentioned at the beginning of our hands-on time, the 4 elements of compost are organic materials, nitrogen, water and air. We aimed to create our pile 4'x4'x4', so this meant constantly spreading the layers to create a wide enough base for the pile to go 4 feet tall. We focused on not packing in the materials, but to keep them fluffy, to remember the place of air in the equation, because if the compost doesn't get enough air, it will go anaerobic and will not be useful for compost. (You know its anaerobic if it smells.)

You can see in the picture above how we brought in water. I learned from the Eco-Fair workshop that you want the right amount of water distributed throughout the pile. We had a hose that we used to  dampen the hay. We got the mown grass from the lawn nearby, and I got to relive my life as a 12 year old when I used to love mowing my family's lawn. I think I even succeeded in making a tiny bit of money mowing my neighbors' lawns, come to think of it! Anyway, if you are using green grass for compost, it is important  to incorporate the grass into the pile right away because grass in particular will turn anaerobic very quickly. We stuck our hands in a pile of grass that had just been sitting for a day, and it had already gotten quite hot!

My group didn't get to finish the pile, but at the end of the day, all the materials were used and the pile was considerable! We'll see what it looks like tomorrow.

Grafting

From Left: Aaron, Brian, Kathy

Our last lesson this afternoon was with Brian. We gathered in a circle around him and listened to Brian's extensive knowledge about all the reasons why grafting is a cool thing that humans have learned to do. Basically, for most types of fruit trees, to grow a successful tree, you do not grow it from a seed. You take cuttings from a desired cultivar and then graft it onto an established rootstock. You can also graft cuttings of one variety of fruit onto the branch of another type of tree, but the two trees have to be related, I believe of the same family. You can also graft a little bud onto the side of an existing rootstock.

My first grafting job came home with me!

All of these things are quite interesting and I had been exposed to grafting in the Art & Science of Fruit Culture from last Block. I didn't know until this class that there are different cuts and unions that you can do to make a graft. Today, Brian showed us the cleft grafting technique, which we immediately practiced using cuttings from the pear tree pruning exercise with Avi.

I love my first grafting job! Perhaps my years working in produce helped, or my artistic inclinations, but I think I did a pretty good job for my first time. What really stood out for me from Brian's talk was how we can use grafting to preserve heirloom fruit tree varieties. I want to know more about what he was saying about how people used grafting to preserve the Mission Fig, because Mission Figs are some of my favorite fruits!

My thanks to Avi, Doug and Brian for a wonderful Hands-on Friday, and I look forward to more hands-on tomorrow after school as I will go help dig holes for a community service event that is being held at Sunny Brook Assisted Living here in Fairfield.

* * *