Pruning Season

The orcharding season always starts for me when I set out on my first day of pruning. The scramble of harvest and pressing seems like a lifetime ago and the landscape of the orchard is just as vastly different. Where green leaves and colorful fruit radiated with a season of growth and completion now is simply bare branches contrasting with the snow and often gray sky, simple and somewhat obvious of the task at hand.

The slowest month of the orcharding schedule is behind us. For sure in December we are happy to slumber and rest, the holidays and winter solstice seem perfectly placed, and always more content are we during this time if we have gathered and stored away whatever it is we find valuable in this world much like squirrels and chipmunks.

I often wake on some random day in January and see that the morning sky is clear, the air is light and in some instinctual way feel the days creeping longer just a bit. The wind will need to be calm too for me to get the pruning itch, temperatures somewhere above 25 degrees helps as well.  But it is on these days that I feel motivation to wind the clock, to set the gears in motion, to start the long haul once again.

There is nothing I love more in orcharding then being out under the sun and bluebird sky, with bright snow shining from below, artfully sculpting and shaping the trees. I love too that my mind wonders with the birds, the ravens and hawks above, the small chickadees hopping around the branches. Pruning at its best is meditation, exercise and art. It oils the gears, floats the mind and engages you with the trees intimately.