N
novellacarpenter
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Whoa, took a trip out to Frog Hollow Farm yesterday. It’s in Brentwood–how have I never made it out there before? Sheesh.
I learned more about fruit trees in the two hours that I spent there than I have in 5 years of my own experiments on my urban orchard. Farmer Al is full of good information. One thing I learned was that I have been pruning my cherry trees all wrong. I guess now that I think about it, I’ve been pruning them like apricot or plum trees. But cherries are pretty lightweight, and you want them to make lots of branches, which will them make lots of fruit. So you can prune their tips–breaking the apical dominance and encouraging new branching below the tips. Gonna get on that–you should too!
While pruning, we discovered this little guy:
It’s a preying mantis egg sac–aka ootheca!
I learned more about fruit trees in the two hours that I spent there than I have in 5 years of my own experiments on my urban orchard. Farmer Al is full of good information. One thing I learned was that I have been pruning my cherry trees all wrong. I guess now that I think about it, I’ve been pruning them like apricot or plum trees. But cherries are pretty lightweight, and you want them to make lots of branches, which will them make lots of fruit. So you can prune their tips–breaking the apical dominance and encouraging new branching below the tips. Gonna get on that–you should too!
While pruning, we discovered this little guy:
It’s a preying mantis egg sac–aka ootheca!