A New Journey Begins!

After a long hard winter break spent snuggled up to a fire counting seeds (that’s what all agriculturalists do, FYI), it wasn’t imaginable that we Aggies might venture out into the cold for our first Agroecosystem lab of the semester. Luckily, Ron Burgundy arrived on the scene with his conch to send out the call.

Ron Burgundy, awakening the Aggies from their winter slumber

Aggies assembling at KPU Richmond

The instinct of the Aggies was strong. Students and instructors arrived on time in near perfect attendance on the back steps of the KPU Richmond campus. Off we carpooled to check out the research orchard and freeze our toes off while pruning. Despite the cold, I was keen to get started on our year long interactive Agroecosystem course series, and I'm sure many other students were as well. We put in countless classroom hours to get this far, and now its time to go outside and plant! ... (in every sense of the word)

It was so cold this Aggy rendered 
themselves completely unidentifiable.

Before turning our attention to the fruit trees, instructors Mike and Rebecca gave us the low down on current research that’s happening in the fields and in the orchard. One of the neat things going on right now is a trial intercropping of potato and wheat. The goal is to evaluate if the wheat can effectively attract wireworms (which are rampant) away from the potatoes (which wireworms are famous for devouring). If all goes according to plan, we will be making unblemished French fries in a few months. If it doesn’t work out so well, we will have to resort to mashed potatoes. What a terrible shame that would be!

Instructors Mike and Rebecca giving 
students a tour of the research farm

After the mini tour we proceeded to mozy around the orchard taking stock of our situation. Last year’s Agroecosystem class was fairly small and didn’t quite get all the work done that they wanted to. This year we have a sizeable class (14 students), so we hope to catch up on any pruning that was missed last year.

7-year-old Crimson Pear trees. Some had to be 
replanted after getting girdled by rodents

We soon settled down in the Crimson Pear section of the orchard. Kent started his demonstration with a reminder of what we need to keep top of mind in order to accomplish our goals. Wikipedia’s Fruit tree pruning page offers some good background for novice pruners, as does this briefing from Oregon State University. Kent warned us that different types of tree fruit (apples and pears vs stone fruits like cherries and peaches) can have vastly different requirements. Even among pear trees, different rootstocks and fruit cultivars may require different pruning methods. Generally speaking though, when we are pruning fruit trees that are not yet mature we are establishing shape and fruiting branches for future years, keeping an appropriate number of fruiting branches for this year, and maintaining a balance between reproductive growth (fruit) and vegetative growth (wood). Pruning during winter dormancy will stimulate vegetative growth and consequently reduce reproductive growth in our pear trees. That is okay at this stage of the tree's life, as we are still establishing shape, size, and are encouraging them to fill the space they were given at planting time. Once the trees have matured our pruning strategy will switch to maintaining shape, renewing old fruiting wood and a greater focus will be put on reproductive growth so we can maximize the number of fruit pies, cider jugs and all manner of other wonderful and delicious things that can be imagined. 

Kent (left) explaining how we can ‘fill space’ by 
positioning tree branches while we prune

The trees we are working with are 7 years old, but given their current size and fruit yield seem to be a bit behind schedule. This can be explained by our location and climate - our soils are not ideal for growing tree fruit (the water table is high and they don’t like having wet roots), there isn't quite enough heat in a typical Richmond summer, and the often strong winds coming off the water don’t help either. Since our trees are not mature yet we are still focusing on expanding and shaping the canopy. Although they have gotten off to a slow start, Kent estimates their vigour is generally good and we should expect our first bumper crop this summer. Exciting!

The ground is littered with wood from Kent’s 
prune job

Check out that briefing I mentioned from OSU for an overview of several different types of ‘Tree Forms’ (page 4). In our case, we are pruning for a multiple leader form, which involves training into a ‘goblet’ shape with an open centre. The theoretical ideal is to have our trees fill their allotted space in the orchard while allowing light to penetrate evenly to all branches without shading out other trees. This will maximize fruit quality. As you can (hopefully) see in the before and after photos, Kent cut quite a bit of wood off in order to encourage good form in this particular tree.

Before and after shots of Kent’s demo pear tree

This tree has been pruned to

multiple leaders. Notice the 
‘goblet’ shape and open 
centre.

Doing is learning, and so after Kent’s demo the students grabbed a partner, a pair of pruners and chose a tree. Stark and I picked a fairly prominent tree (second tree in the first row) so we could easily return and observe our handy work in the future. I have to admit - knowing how much was on the line made each and every cut daunting. The choice of tree variety, the rootstock that it grows on, the amendments and cover crops in the soil, all the pruning that has been carefully made by years of growers, the selection of leading branches and more are all in your hands as you try not to mess up what everyone has had in mind for this tree's future. With this existential burden weighing heavily on our shoulders we very judiciously made cuts and debated what our best possible moves were. In the mean time, Kent coolly strolled the orchard clipping as though he hadn’t a care in the world. 

We started by identifying the three main leader branches, finding out where the ‘centre’ was, and slowly removing branches we were confident we didn’t need. We quickly found the ‘theoretical ideal’ we had come to know in past discussions was far from our reality - but don't worry - we were able to assure ourselves we were making the best of our situation. We were able to open up the centre, thin out crowded areas and make heading cuts to stimulate localize vegetative growth in desirable areas, as Kent had advised. With a little guidance from our instructors we worked our way through some of the more difficult decisions – like choosing the tree’s height. You can see what we ended up with in our before and after photos. Like Kent, we also ended up taking off a lot of wood.

Before and after shots of the tree Stark and I worked on. As you can see, its going to

take some years of careful pruning before the goblet shape fully forms

Overall I thought it was a great morning in the orchard and I look foreword to continuing to build my experience pruning trees. For me, it’s very unique and intriguing to consider the thought of maintaining a long-term relationship with an organism that is less than super animate. With humans, dogs and even horses I have found communicating and understanding one another is fairly intuitive. Through the use of our voices and body language, along with careful attention to detail, we can arrive at a mutual understanding of each others needs and desires and develop a relationship based on shared terms. Information is quite forthcoming from those we interact with and the feedback is often instantaneous.

Such is not the case with a fruit tree. With a fruit tree, the grower must be completely tuned in to how the tree is responding and predict how it is likely to respond to continued stimulus. Lack of vigilance could easily result in misreading a situation or repeating mistakes. Consequences can range anywhere from one unproductive tree to seriously crippling an entire orchard. In order to optimize the relationship between fruit tree and human, the grower needs to bring knowledge and understanding of the organism as well as the environment it is living in to the table. Attention to detail must be stretched out over long periods of time... patience and persistence must be practiced. The upside is once you understand your context and you partner organism, you have the opportunity to tell it what to do, and it will do fruit for you by the bunches. A skilled and knowledgable grower can more or less dictate the terms of the relationship (within the biological capacity of the organism, which we are also manipulating through various means such as rootstocks). Once you understand a tree's tendencies and environment you can make commands over the years and have it fulfil your desires, wether they be cherry pie, apple strudel, dancing sugar plums or a delicious savoury fruit concoction. 

Aggies happily at play in the orchard

We humans have spent hundreds, if not thousands of years selecting genes for our cultivars, improving pruning techniques, breeding rootstocks to control tree size and experimenting with training systems and heat capture mechanisms like fruit walls. There has never been more knowledge available or more tools at our disposal to tell the tree what to do and get what we want from it. Now more then ever our orchards are a reflection of ourselves. Are we focused on high economic return? There is a rootstock/cultivar/nutrient/canopy management regime for that. Are we interested in maintaining varieties with interesting flavour and other characteristics, despite being uneconomic at an industrial scale? There is an entirely different system required for that, and it is going to look completely different compared to an industrial system. But unless you have trees of your own you are going to have to peruse the farmers markets and backyards of hobby orchardists to find those unique flavours and colours. We just don't plant, prune or grow near infinite varieties of fruits like we used to, for better or for worse. If you need convincing that loss of genetic diversity is a problem, think of it this way - can it ever be possible that a reduction in the array of sweet wonderful fruits to choose from is a good thing? This writer thinks not.