Quote:
Originally Posted by kika
My main interest is the having lots of edible fruit rather than having a nice looking garden. I didn't prune because the trees had already started to flower. It would be a shame to chop any down but maybe they've become too wild to bear anything decent. How do you deal with the ones you didn't chop down? Do you use sulfur?
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I doubt if your trees have "become too wild". However, it is possible they could benefit from pruning, that they're of varieties that produce fruit which you won't find as nice as other, more modern varieties, that some will only produce a good crop of tasty fruit in years when the weather in your patch is just right and or that some trees might need to be removed because they're diseased and beyond help.
You'll probably know the answer to most of those questions by the time you put up a Christmas tree. Unfortunately, even an expert (which I am not) would have difficulty making an accurate assessment now and offering good advice without a lot more information on what exactly you think is wrong with each of the trees.
The trees here I didn't remove were huge cherry trees, very old apple trees (of an unknown and not wonderful-tasting variety), a few figs (which grow like weeds around here), walnuts (most of which are in a plantation) and a few others which escaped the chop just because I got a bit fed up with the task and they're in corners where they aren't an obstuction or causing other problems.
I've not sprayed anything this year. Partly that's because there are other things occupying my time and partly it's because I consider sprays a last resort. Mainly it's because the scale of things here. In my last British garden, I had space for half a dozen spindle-pruned apple trees. They were each coddled - indeed, the British climate means you generally
have to coddle most fruit trees if you want any sort of harvest - whereas here we have a dozen old apple trees alone. It's impossible for me to get too concerned about the bugs munching on leaves and fruit since losing a few - or even a few hundred - apples to maggots will still leave us with much more than we need.
I'm not a commercial grower, I'm not at all concerned about what the neighbours think of how I'm managing the trees and I don't have an enormous extended family which will be grateful for some free food, so things in the orchard are basically left to get on with finding their own balance. I believe the same applied to the previous owner. He probably just called it saving money, but you could stick a fancier label on it: 'minimal input farming' or 'organic'.
The vegetable garden is a slightly different story: it's intensely planted in raised beds and closely managed, but even there pest control is of the 'pick it off and squish it' or 'shrug and accept it' sort, rather than by spraying chemicals ('organic' or not) at the first sign of a creepy-crawlie or a blemished tomato.
I have no idea of the scale of your garden or how many trees you're talking about and I have little idea of the severity of the problems with the trees, but I continue to suspect things are unlikely to be a total loss if you just let matters run their natural course this year. If nothing else, it will be yet another aspect of the learning process of having a new home in Italy.
Al