Chop, Chop!

The trees will thank you (not literally, obviously)

Greetings, Ciderling!

📢Just two spots left on our pruning course THIS SATURDAY 📢

We’re in the over-wintering period and the apple trees are still sleepy. Same, apple trees. Same. All that bashing on pots and pans that we did at the Wassail will have helped stir them a little. Soon they’ll wake up and start producing a riot of blossoms. But before they yawn, stretch, and start growing again, it’s time to give them an extreme (think post-break-up/mid-life crisis level) haircut. 

✂️ Always prune responsibly

As Nick Lowe once sang, you gotta be cruel to be kind. So each year, we give the apple trees a good harsh cut back. We do it in Winter while the sap is all sleepy and still, before the trees wake up and start their Spring growth spurt. They’ll reward our efforts with a better apple crop. And the better the crop, the better the cider.

We need to prune because left to their own devices the trees grow in all sorts of random directions. A bit like Beardy’s beard if he’s not careful. 

Rogue, overly keen branches block out the light and make it harder for our creepy crawly buggy pals to pollinate the blossom. Pruning can feel cruel, but it promotes vigorous growth and more fruiting buds. More fruiting buds mean more apples. Just don’t balls it up and snip all the ends of tip bearing trees or cut the wrong part off a spur. Which we’ve definitely never done…honest. 

And if we continue to take our advice from ‘70s singer-songwriters (and why the heck wouldn’t we?) you gotta be cruel to be kind, IN THE RIGHT MEASURE. In pruning terms - make sure you know what you’re doing.

Book onto our pruning course to learn how to chop properly (and get some outdoorsy therapy). It’s THIS SATURDAY 7th February, 10am - 2pm. 

Phil (aka Bignose) will cover:

• why we prune our trees for health and productivity

• how to use different tools and techniques

• different approaches for spur and tip fruiting varieties

• how to plan your pruning for each tree 

• how to manage sequential pruning over several years

Tea, coffee, cake, lunch, and a cheeky cider tasting are included in your £50 ticket. 

Hope you can make it. Promise we won’t start singing 70s hits. Actually, scrap that. We can’t make that promise. 

On an especially quiet day at BN&B Towers, we googled our names to see which photos came up first. Can you tell who’s who? 🤔

Cheers!

BN&B