Coming off multiple snowy weeks and wind/rain storms, today dawned bright and warm.  My goal was to get out there and spend a few hours cleaning up the orchard garden–and I made it!  It felt wonderful!

I tackled the shrubs along the fence today–including the tatarian honeysuckle in the corner.  This is the only shrub that I actually pollard.  Because of the aggressive growth, its really the only way to keep it in line.  You can see to the right of it, there are three trunks.  These were suckers from the black locust tree that is haunting that fence.  The tree was cut down over 20 years ago by our neighbor.  It suckered a bit after being removed, but I kept on top of it pretty good for many years.  Somehow, one of the suckers snuck up and reached about 25 feet tall, with a six inch diameter trunk.  I had it cut down last year when the bitter cherry was cut out.  These three suckers were the result–ten to fifteen feet tall each!  I have a love/hate relationship with black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia).  I love them in other people’s yards and hate them in mine!  I’m still bleeding from fighting those three suckers–they bite back with stout thorns!  And it is even tougher to cut them down, knowing they will be back!

I pruned the David Austen roses, too, but not much.  Most of them look pretty good–one of them (Ebb Tide) looks a little sickly.  You can see what Ebb Tide looks like here.  It is so beautiful, it is definitely worth babying a bit.  I pruned everything around it so it should get more sun.

The espaliered Asian pear with five cultivars looks pretty good.  Some of the grafts are more vigorous than the others.  I pruned it a bit to eliminate growth that was headed the wrong way.

Here is a Chester blackberry start that I purchased online last year from Raintree Nursery.  It isn’t in a great place for a small plant, but once it gets some growth on it, I think it will do fine here, between the Asian pear and the Santa Rosa plum.

The wallflowers that I grew from seed two years ago didn’t die back at all–they seem very healthy and happy near the plum tree.  I should get good flowers from these this year.

View towards the street.  The large tree in the foreground is a Glacier cherry on Gisela 5 rootstock from Raintree.  The tree is approaching ten feet, which should be its max.  The challenge is keeping the birds away from the cherries.  I planted a few wild cherry trees and two other cultivars last year so that there would be cross pollination.  This tree is supposed to be self fertile, but it only seems to produce ripe cherries every other year so far.  It was planted five years ago.  The other berries, the goumi and the aronia are all in this photo.  Things look pretty clean at this point–just need to wait for warmer weather to fertilize things a bit and enjoy the show of flowers and fruit that will hopefully follow.

Here are two containers of prunings from the orchard bed.  You can also see the trunk-like end of a branch that came down from the Douglas fir tree late last year.

You get more of a sense of the side of the branch that fell into the Doug fir bed.  I didn’t have the energy to saw it up today–will tackle it next weekend.