Posted on Wed, Nov 25, 2009
I started this week with a coffee, I haven't been drinking much but I got the feeling that it's that time again. It's hard in the winter to get up and go... the winds are strong, the rain is cold and your wellies, no matter how warm they say they are end up feeling very cold and wet inside by the end of the day. So I drink a coffee and get motivated to get stuff done.
I've been compiling list after list of jobs that need doing, and questioning the urgency of each one. It really helps to do this, if a chart is draw with Important/ Not important as two columns and Urgent/Not Urgent as two rows, you can pin point what needs to be done and when. I also factor the weather into this decision making process, for example felling trees isn't a smart thing to do on wet and windy days, but pruning soft fruit is (although it's not fun when wet it is safe).
Top of my list for this week was to finish pruning all the currants, we had started it a few weeks ago, but it was a long way from being finished. So the wheel barrow tyres were pumped up and the secaturs were sharpened and I went to start the job, after one or two plants I realized that I needed to read up on my soft fruit pruning.
The bushes all require slightly different treatment, the Black Currants need to have the 3-4 year old wood removed to encourage new vigorous growth and the young shoots are left, the Black Currants will produce good fruit on the young wood but as it grows older the fruits become smaller.
The Red and White Currants need quite the opposite treatment. A structure in the bush needs to be formed, in order to support a number of 'leaders' which will then support the fruiting branches. Over the years it's hard to see exactly what people were trying to achieve with the bushes at Emerson, you can trace cuts back and only guess what the method was, it's quite fun and makes me feel a bit like a historian or archaeologist.
We have been removing lots of older, diseased, damaged and less productive wood, in favor of the young branches which I can see have the potential of making new growth next year. I'm also trying to make more space around and through the base of the plants to allow air circulation and the same is being done for the center. Remembering back to the summer and sitting on the grass in the summer harvesting the berries I can recall that some of the trusses were not so easy to reach so we are trying to form a shape that is easier to reach when fruiting.
The thing about pruning is that you can only predict (like the weather) so far what will happen after each cut. You normally cut at a bud so that that bud will continue to grow in the direction it is pointing, but sometimes that won't happen and another branch lower down becomes the leader.... So with all the best intentions when pruning you only know exactly what happens the year after, i'm very excited already to see how the plants will respond.
I am fairly sure that the bushes have not grown much in the past because the weight of the netting restricts the growth throughout the summer. You can actually see that plants under the posts are taller than the ones in the middle. I'll fix that this year by putting in two new sets of post to hold the netting higher off the plants.