Sweetheart Pruning

On the same day that Tom Pitts gave us advice on Skeenas we also visited our 2008 Sweethearts. Tom's recommendation for the Sweethearts is to tip! The Peebles brothers have a different pruning strategy that they employed last year after cherry harvest. We all agree that it looks promising. It appears they leave the weak branches. If they don't like a limb they cut it out.

We have a lot of fruit buds here. It kind of looks like a Peebles brothers orchard. I'm so excited!

Tom's advice is tip 1 year old wood and stub the vigorous.

At certain times it's necessary to make a dutch cut. Tom explained that a dutch cut is a flat cut on a vertical limb that leaves more room for a flat weaker off shoot.

Tom always carries flagging tape to mark trees that he has done something to and wants to track progress.

The spreaders in the trees are in the position they were placed last season. Tom is repositioning this spreader so that the limb will continue to grow as flat as possible. He tells us that our crew needs to rebend everything. Last year, Bill observed that frequently the guys would not reposition the spreaders and just call it good. To avoid that again this year, Bill is planning to have all of the spreaders removed in advance to force new positioning of the spreader.

Zinc feeds the leaves. Last year we switched to a different kind of zinc, metalasate zinc and we sprayed more zinc sulfate.  According to leaf analysis it worked, so we'll want to do that again. Tom is showing us that we had great leaf size last season. The bigger the leaves, the bigger the fruit.

 

Tom is now in our older block of Sweethearts that are ~ 8 years old.

They have a lot of fruiting wood this year as well. Last spring we tilled the soil around the trees to remove the grass cover, and then we added 100 lbs per acre of dried poultry waste.

The goal in pruning these trees is to build structure in the trees. So the crew will tip limbs on the bottom scaffold of the tree which will produce more branches. They'll avoid pruning the tops of the trees to retard growth at the tops.

This is a bacterial canker that is knitting together and healing nicely. We have been working hard to eliminate this issue and will share more later.