With our largest fruit trees, we're starting to move out of training mode and into maintenance mode.  We finally hit summer pruning at the right time, so there wasn't terribly much to cut off, but I did a lot of nitpicky snipping to remove branches that were hidden underneath their neighbors.

I did cut off two main scaffold limbs on our biggest peach, which was a bit scary but seemed like the right thing to do.  Over time, these branches had bent down under the weight of fruit and were now well within the fungal zone (the moist area right above the soil surface).  Luckily, higher branches had filled in over top, so removing the low branches didn't leave a gap in the tree.

We've missed eating peaches for two years now.  Hopefully 2013 will once again be the year of the peach?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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