We have moved to another tree.
A patch of Washington is and a very healthy patch as you can see by the size of the leaves.
We have actually pruned this, this is our third year of pruning, we have taken a corner
out each side and it hasn't fully closed up.
We have only pruning this tree just last week and we have cut this one out of the top so
the spiky stuff is gone where the hedger has been through all the time.
What we're going to do next year as this one dense is up with new foliage we will take
this one out.
Again no pole saws, only what you can reach with a chainsaw.
And slowly in the next three years we will move around dropping those higher limbs down
that the hedger has left behind with all of that spiky stuff you can see up there and
that really makes you know fruit and it would be good to cut it out now but that will mean
massive sunlight and massive sunburn and water shoots, dis- budding is expensive, I am trying
to keep the pruning as cheap as I can having less dis-budding and more fruiting wood like
this staying alive in the tree.
Again you can see little deadwood through the tree.
We haven't gone and hand done all this wood, it's just by cutting big limbs and moving
them out every year.
As you can see the main aim of this pruning technique, is that you can see the light filtering
through.
It's not a lot of light and you can see a water shoot here maybe, but that will fall
very quickly, it's not strong.
So we don't want too much light.
The other thing about this pruning technique is that you're trying to teach someone to
prune a tree is always difficult.
When you tell them to walk in and cut one side or cut one out of the top they can do
it really successfully.
As you can see what we're after is the light, you can see the filtered light coming through
the tree, it's not a massive amount of light right through to the ground, so you can have
this nice speckled leopard spot on the ground.
And this is caused by just this one cut, so when you're trying to teach someone to prune,
a one cut or a multiple cut of a stage, like one cut here then one cut there if that was
the smallest branch is easy to explain to anyone.
So you don't have to have highly pruning labour to do this pruning technique.
Another important thing about the pruning style in trying to get the fruit inside the
tree, is that Tony Flippi told me, if you have your fruit on the outside of a conventional
tree 50% of it will be marked from the wind particularly with the amount we have had this
year.
I've put 50% of my fruit inside the tree, 50% of fruit outside the tree, so now I have
25% of market fruit which gives me great packouts, as you can see all the fruit outside the tree
is bigger it is nicer and we have good export potential for this piece of fruit.
This is a tree that's been pruned for four years, you can see it's nice and open and
we are starting to get all the young shoots coming in here, by the top needs cleaning
and what we're going to do is just cut that one out there which will take that north-east
side out to keep the light coming in.
With the hole we cut out on each side a couple of years ago here, this makes this very easy
to pull out.
That one little cut as you can see now has let light in through this hole, which is just
enough light in here to keep it growing but no water shoots because they're too expensive
to pull out.
As you can see by this piece of wood I've cut out, it's actually not much good anyway,
there will be no high-quality fruit come off it, it's up on the top of the tree where the
fruit moves around and gets marked readily anyway so.
You do not have any crop loss by pruning, we have actually found the opposite the more
you prune the better crops we get.