Well, I managed to get at least something done outside today!

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The before and after pictures. I was losing light by the time I was done, so the second shot turned out pretty bad. Sorry.

My goal was to take care of the one at the end of the row of crabapples; far left in the photos. I’ve been tasting apples from different suckers, and there were two that have good apples on them. Everything else got cut away. Quite a bit of it was already dead. In the second photo, you can see the remains of the original tree that, from how rotten that stump is, died a very long time ago.

As I was clearing that one, I found quite a few branches from the tree next to it were entangled, so I started pruning that one, too. It has lots of little apples on it, but they are inedible. I was pretty ruthless in pruning it. The trees are too close together, and I don’t mind if we lose that one. The critters can eat the apples, though, so as I cleared away the branches, I made sure to shake off all the apples onto the ground. I’m sure the deer will enjoy them.

Since I still had some light, I did some work on the next tree. This is the one that has the really tasty little apples – a wonderful combination of tart and sweet. Unfortunately, this tree is dying. There were several large dead branches that I cut away, and wow did that ever open the whole thing up! One of the branches was so entwined with others, I had to cut it into three pieces, just to get it out.

All of the trees could use more pruning, but I did as far as I could reach. I could bring the little scaffolding over to work on them, but I think they’ve had enough pruning for this season. I don’t want to over do it. I’m not going to bother with the other crab apple trees, since they really should be cut down. One of them, diseased as it is, still has lots of tiny apples on it that the grosbeaks love to eat in the winter. I don’t want to remove a food source if I can wait. It will be a while before the silver buffalo berry start producing berries but, once they do, they are supposed to be quite prolific and should make up for the loss of crab apples as a critter food source.

Before starting on this, I went through all the tomatoes outside, boxed up the ripe ones and brought them inside. Tomorrow will be a day of preparing and freezing most of them, and maybe setting more up to dehydrate in the oven. We’re also supposed to be warm and dry over the next few days, so I hope to be able to get back to work on that trellis bed. Plus, our garlic should be arriving next week, so I want to make sure to have a bed prepared for them, too.

Lots of work to get done, before winter comes!

Oh, that reminds me. No word from the financing lady today, so I don’t expect to hear from her until Monday. It’s probably quite a challenge for her to find a deal that fits our budget for monthly payments!

Ah, well. What will be, will be.

The Re-Farmer