The Prairie Spy
Alan “Lindy” Linda

It’s January. Pretty bleak time of year. Survived Christmas. First snow. First cold weather. First cold virus. The general attitude is “whatever.”

The same goes for newspapers. This time of year is slow for them and so they often have space to fill. A local newspaper thus ran an article of “winter pruning” of fruit trees.

WHOA!!! Let’s just hold up a minute while I, who have had apple trees this far north for fifty years, have something to say about this “winter” pruning theory.

I currently have 80 apple trees, and will be the first to admit that my intention to have something to do when I retire was, to say the least, poorly conceived. Well executed, because they’re all doing well, but poorly conceived because there is so much work in the spring, pruning being, if done well, a huge task.

Therefore, many years ago, we had an extremely warm March. So warm that I thought I should go out there and get a jump start on pruning. (The only good thing about this is I had only about 15 or so trees.) I pruned and congratulated myself on being ahead of the game.

Spring came. I was aghast to see that each of those early pruning cuts sprouted two, three, even four branches. Right from around the cut. The following spring, I had triple the pruning to do.

Here’s what happens, from the tree’s point of view. First– trees and plants of all sorts may not be able to think in the way we humans do, and they’re not very fast at processing input, but they do. They take in and store information about rainfall, angle and amount of sun, quantity of rain, first frost, first thaw, ground temperature, even the rate at which the temperature falls in the autumn and rises in the spring.

They’re not fast. That’s why we wait until spring comes and the tree is just beginning to respond to ground temperature–around here, it’s when lawn grass begins to grow. If you prune now, at this time, the tree does not have time to realize that Hey! I have a bunch of branches that must have been broken off in the winter and I’m going to send out some more!

Don’t early spring-prune apple trees. Doing that gives them a head start on you. We kind of wait until the last moment. Trick them.