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It’s pruning time and if you haven’t
started then you’d better plan it this weekend. The sap is still dormant on the
grapevines, roses and fruit trees, but if we get too many sunny days like we’ve had
recently, that will change rapidly. After spraying make sure you spray with a protective
fungicide, like Bordeaux mixture or KocideŽ. While the citrus don’t need pruning for
anything other than shape, you need to spray with PestOil™ to take out the scale and
citrus leaf miner. Grapevines need to be cut back
pretty hard to short spurs, unless you have sultanas (red or white varieties), also known
as "Thompson’s Seedless", then you have to leave at least 10 pairs of buds
on long canes or you won’t get any fruit. That requires you to cultivate new canes
every few years for next year’s crop.
Pruning roses is not the great shakes it’s made out to
be. Like "Footy Pics" that my Annie makes me select for her office, I manage to
get half right all the time or half wrong depending on your attitude, but either way it
looks like you’re trying! Some with roses. You can take the really-don’t-care
attitude and remove all dead wood, plus half of the canopy and they will look great. You
can also spend a lot of time creating a three-pronged inverted cone and they will look
great too. The latter will also look healthier and produce long flowering spikes on your
HTs!
Pruning miniature roses requires a leather gauntlet and all
you do is grab the bush in one hand, as close to the ground as possible and cut off all
above the clenched fist. Dead easy eh? You see the miniatures have their nodes so close
together and they are usually so prolific in the flowering habits, that only an eccentric
would bother trying to select their cuts on a miniature rose. The intermediates will
impale you on the horns of a dilemma. Compromise!
If you have a dual or triple grafted apple, with two or
three varieties on one rootstock, caution is wise. The most vigorous variety is
‘Granny Smith’ in that trilogy trick and it grows tallest in its early years,
but if pruned back hard to foster the others to catch up, it grows even larger! Secret is
to prune the others back hard and let the "Granny" have her head! Multi-grafts
are a pain in the neck!
While stone fruits (there are no ‘stoned fruits’,
they are all quite respectable) can be lightly pruned in late spring and early summer,
they all need winter pruning. If you don’t know how to prune, get a book. Even the
worst text on the topic will help. My Dad was a great gardener, but never trusted himself
to prune his much-loved fruit trees. He always got a professional in and old Ted Pix
pruned those five trees in two hours, every year. Dad reckoned that was the best quid he
spent every year! |
