Pruning

The other day we helped my folks prune an old apple tree.  I am trying to recall how long the apple tree has been on their property.  Generations of woodpeckers have left tracks of bores in the tree's trunk and major branches, and it has two major forks.  I'm thinking it must have been planted during the early seventies, because I believe it wasn't originally on the lot when they purchased it.  Oddly, I can't remember seeing the tree as a sapling; in my mind it's always been this bent up twist of apple-producing branches.  

I guess it would have been planted in their vegetable garden along with some other fruit trees--Mom was living the full County Extension Agent Life back then and recorded two or three garden-to-pantry instructional videos on food preservation.  The rows of corn and peas and sunflowers are long gone, but the apple tree's still in the center of the lot.  

It was severely pruned a few years back, with the result that it put out phalanxes of narrow wands along the main branches.  In the autumn, these become over-burdened with many little green apples, and it's gotten to the point where some of the branches will crack if there's any kind of windy weather.

Our goal was to take out only about a fourth or a third of the undergrowth, which took us about two and a half hours of hacking and lopping and sawing and pulling.  We'll have to prune again, maybe in the summer to take out any dead limbs, but more likely this time next year.

My folks seemed fine.  I had a chat with my mom about reading CG Jung; she was amused when I said that it felt a little like reading somebody's drunk poetry and concluded that it might have been gin, but it certainly wasn't tequila that old Carl Gustav was drinking because there wasn't enough naked people in his quasi-religious ramblings.