The Country Garden Showcase- Week 2

     Happy Monday!  The weather here in the foothills of the Southern Sierra-Nevada Mountains remains unseasonably warm.  I am quite worried about our fruit trees, they're not getting nearly enough hours of freezing temps to set much fruit AND- they are budding out.  In my 27 years living in this region, I have only seen this a few times.  It usually ends badly, a late freeze that kills flowers and a long, cold, dry winter.

   
     On the bright side, since I am not expecting much of a harvest, this a GREAT year to heavily prune a few damaged or ill shaped older fruit trees in my garden, like the example above.

late red flowering peach tree blossoms

     A great resource for anyone pruning fruit trees is HERE!  This UC Davis/Cooperative Extension publication covers training and pruning of deciduous fruit trees.  It includes dwarf, semi-dwarf, and standard tree information and it provides a good basic education on the three most common fruit tree pruning systems: open center, central leader, and the modified central leader system.  It includes images and examples.  Please check it out.

     I have taken many cuttings from this heavy pruning session and have bundled them up, labeled them, and have them sitting in a dip n' grow rooting hormone/water mixture overnight.  In the morning, I will double check my cuttings to be sure all the cuttings are exposed a bit at the base and cut near nodes which are meristemetic tissue (rapid cell division tissue), a place that will root.  Then, I'll prepare a 4x4 area in my garden and DIRECT plant the fruit tree cuttings in a peat moss, perlite, and bark mix which I will keep moist.  They should be rooted within 4-6 weeks.  I need to get started taking root stock cuttings this week too.  I will treat them similarly with rooting hormone, and making certain to plant them in the correct direction (polarity= up/down) I will plant them in a peat moss, perlite mix and grow them out too. Next year, I hope to have strong root stock and scion stock to graft together to get my orchard going.

   That's what's been going on in my country garden.  Please tell us what YOU'VE been doing in YOURS.

I have linked up to the Homestead Barnhop!