gardening lesson learned

[mellowtigger]

Click to read about Minnesota weather and apricot tree adventures...

We got another noticeable snowfall on Saturday evening and most of Sunday. The majority of the precipitation went south of the Twin Cities. I think I got about 18cm/7in here at my house. I left the snow shovel there for a better sense of scale. Here's a photo after I shoveled the snow after work on Sunday afternoon.

By Monday morning, the air temperature was -18C/0F (windchill -22C/-8F). Patrol on Monday morning was cold. It has warmed considerably since then. We even have 21C/70F forecast during the daytime on Saturday. It's still early-Spring in Minnesota, though, so we have plenty of below-freezing nights ahead of us. I intend to get some seeds into flats finally today.

I had to do something about the nice apricot tree in my back yard. When I first got the sapling, I planted it and placed that curly plastic ribbon around the base, thinking people did that to protect them from bugs somehow that might crawl up to harm the graft. Or maybe it would prevent them from sending out side shoots low on the trunk? It doesn't matter. I was wrong. It did nothing useful like that. In fact, the ribbon was counter-productive. I finally noticed that the graft was not healing properly. Lots of sap was coming from it. I removed the plastic ribbon, allowing it to get sunlight and air. It did heal, as expected. Unfortunately, however, while it was still wounded, the weight of many apricots pulled the apricot trunk down at the point of the graft. It healed eventually, but the tree is permanently "sideways" now. I tried propping up the trunk with some wood, but the tree never really corrected itself.

These are the before and after pictures. I took a photo of how it was, then I searched online and found this page from University of Minnesota Extension service. It recommends pruning them in March, "after the coldest weather has passed".
https://extension.umn.edu/fruit/growing-stone-fruits-home-garden

While I expect more freezing temperatures, I don't expect any more -18C/0F temperatures. So this morning, I took out the electric chainsaw and performed some very heavy pruning. I hope the apricot tree recovers okay, and I hope it grows much more upright. It'll always have a bit of a "hook" low on the trunk, though.

Gardening lesson learned: Don't put those curly plastic ribbons around tree trunks, at least not on grafted trees.