I finished pruning & training the espalier peach 'Peregrine' (rootstock on St Julien, 2006) from where I left off on Friday 11th September because it has been too wet for Joe to do so last week, and because Prunus are proned to fungal disease it has to be done on a relatively dry day. It is looking more and more that the peach tree possibly has a bacterial canker, there is a lot of random die back and a sticky gum is oozing from some of its stems. Jim is going to check to confirm.
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Photo 1: Prunus persica 'Peregrine' after pruning and training. |
Gerry explained to me the difference between a two stroke and four stroke engine, both have a piston which compresses air and oil (25:1) together, but air and exhaust chambers work differently, four stroke has an oil chamber so that is why it is not possible to turn these engines upside down (unlike on strimmers and hedge cutters which are two stroke), but they make more powerful engines.
Then with Doug I pruned and tied back a Japanese Wineberry Rubus phoenicolasius on the wall of the Honest Sausage Cafe. Like the hybrid berries we cut out the stems that have flowered (they are usually more branching and have remnants of fruit on them) and tied in the new stems for flowering and fruiting next year. Sigrid usually trains this into pretty shapes and patterns. There were suckers that we are going to dig up and keep.
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Photo 2: Rubus phoenicolasius pruned and trained. |
Then we did a similar thing with summer raspberries - a thornless variety called 'Glencoe', autumn raspberries you cut right back to the ground because they fruit on new wood, but summer ones flower on old 2 year wood, so you cut out the spent ones and tie in the 1 year old wood. The new canes are a bit confusing on these as they are quite branching. After this we cut out weak, overly crossing or congested stems, we try to keep as many as possible but this must be able to have a fist gap between each one. We used a special tying in method that helps deals with many canes efficiently and is best presented in this video:
https://www.rhs.org.uk/videos/advice/Raspberries-tying-in-canes
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Photo 3: Raspberry 'Glencoe' before pruning and training. |
Emily and Pavlina were installing wires into new posts and demonstrated how they were doing this.
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Photo: The big drill they used to make holes for the screw in hooks. |
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Photo: Putting the wire through the hook, they used a custom made tool - a cylinder of metal with a hole in it... |
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Photo: ... to twist the end of the wire to secure it. There is a nut & bolt at the end of the screw how and they tightened the wire with a spanner. |