Fruit Tree Pruning Workshop

Not sure how we managed it today, but our tree pruning workshop managed to just dodge the showers, and miss the worst of the wind!

A jolly bunch of folk turned up from many places, and were all delighted to spend 3 hours with Marc Richmond, a local pruning expert with RHS training. It was a good learning curve, as Marc began with the car park orchard trees, which are quite young, went into the Mill Allotments to work on some more mature trees, and then returned to Windmill itself to help us with the on-going revival of our wild and wooly pear tree before finishing with a good old haircut for the gooseberries, and currants in the fruit cage. He covered apples, pears, plums, cherries and soft fruit, so everyone found out something useful. (NB. stone fruit need to be pruned when they are in leaf and growing strongly to avoid silver-leaf disease, so they weren't pruned during the session).

It was pretty chilly, so everyone was really pleased at the end to have a chance to warm up with some parsnip curry soup from Tracey, and some excellent cake from Birgit (thanks again!). A nice side effect of the course is that we now have lots of cuttings for making new plants!