April 17, 2013

Kind doctors make stinking wounds

This is a loose translation of a Dutch saying (zachte heelmeesters maken stinkende wonden) which means that to do something right you are better off doing it thoroughly, even if it hurts a bit. All this as an intro to fruit culling.

When my friend Phil was here to trim the fruit trees with me, he told me there would be a lot of fruit this year and to make sure that I take off a lot of it to ensure a good crop. Today was the day. At first it is difficult to pick off fruit (I love peaches and apricots) and the trees were loaded. But I understand that a tree can only support so much or it will produce lots of tiny fruit with large stones. It is a bit like Christmas shopping: buying that first present takes the most time, after that spending gets easier.


So far I have only tackled one peach tree and the apricot. The other peaches are still too small, as are the apples. In spite of taking off all this



there will still be a lot of fruit to ripen. Hopefully there will be enough to share with the birds and the insects as they will be there first.


2 comments:

webb said...

That's a significant difference! Wonder if ther is anything you can do with the unripe ones? Like jelly? Cant wait to see a ripe apricot.

Anneke said...

The ones I took off are really small, and hard. I contemplated giving them to the chickens or horses, but think everybody would get a belly ache.

It's you and me both on that ripe apricot :-).