September Gardening

Mention “pruning” to casual gardeners and they go into a cold sweat, ‘red fury or a blue funk.  Quite frankly when you see the reams of mysterious instructions which are written - its enough to give anybody chromatic fantasia.  In one small gardening book of my acquaintance there are 25 lines of index devoted to pruning.  There are instructions on how to prune a 1, 2 or 3 year old apple tree, in addition to those of adult status.  Fruit bushes, roses, shrubs, climbers, vines, newly planted trees all have their own instructions, in addition to those which should have been dug up long ago.

Bless me, there are even methods of pruning geraniums and fuschias.  And a great many kinds of fancy pruning called after the inventors - plus a great many inventors thinking up some fancy pruning to call after themselves!!!  No wonder the poor and not-too-energetic gardener who only wants to know how to get maximum apples with minimum labour shuts his book with a bang and goes to the nearest shop for a bag of Granny Smiths or Red Delicious.

Well, what do we do.  The aim of all living creatures, the bible says, is to go forth and multiply and vegetation has the same idea.  Therefore anything which appears to frustrate this makes them put forth more fruit. ‘Prune a tree and the first snip of the cutters will signal to the roots an order for further effort and to the sap cells an order to make fruit and not leaf buds.” But as fruit must be preceded by flower, each time you cut a spray of apple blossom the tree creates several more in self-defence for the following year.  Worrying the roots a little bit in digging has the same result.  Any check to the nervous system will signal a warning of its approaching end and hasten seed formation.  Take an example of easy pruning - instead of allowing* an apple tree to produce flower and fruit in mass and then thinning the fruit, cut sprays of blossom for indoor decoration when in the bud stage.  (Two jobs done at one stroke).  The result so far as the quantity of fruit is concerned is the same - the effect on the house is stupendous.

To be called an outstanding gardener you do not need to do all the usual things, only better, you need merely to do them differently.  Take a blackcurrant - the moment October dawns every gardening correspondent says in his usual officious manner, “cut out all the old wood from blackcurrants so that once it has fruited the new shoots are given a chance”.  If however you cut the old wood while the currants are still on it and take the branch dripping with the heavy black fruit into the kitchen you can pick the fruit sitting down.  Then from June until October the young shoots can absorb all the nourishment which the roots push up without interference from the old wood.  More on this next month.

From the pen of A. Lyssum