This last week I’ve pruned our cordonned apple trees and the pear. It’s always a job that fills me with uncertainty. The trees never look like the diagrams in the book where there is a clear leader stem and clear laterals with buds facing the right way. My principles are: (1) as Monty Don has said, ‘Always prune to somewhere – a bud …’. (2) Cut back to 3 or 4 buds on the laterals or sub-laterals. (3) Make a diagonal cut running away from a bud, and (4) cut to outward facing buds in the direction you want to encourage growth.

Our trees are now 12 years old and had grown waywardly during 2023. I’ve tried to cut out stems coming forward to restore the shape growing along the wall. Sadly, there’s some evidence of disease: maybe canker, maybe some kind of gall. I’m hoping that the trees are robust enough to survive. We’ll just have to see.

Last year and the year before, they mostly fruited well apart from the middle two (Saltcote Pippin and Mannington’s Permain I think). These two were infested with wooly aphids. I was advised to treat them with hand sanitiser! It sort of worked, and as we are a mainly organic garden, I wasn’t going to spray them. Now it’s just a case of waiting and hoping that my pruning technique hasn’t made things worse. This afternoon, I’ll be wiping over some of the larger prunings with wound sealant.