Each spring, gardeners from amateurs to professionals prepare for the growing season to come. That includes researching, planting, and the maintenance of established plants. In Western Colorado that can also mean fruit trees.
On a windy day in New Castle, attendees from towns all over the Western Slope are converging for a fruit tree pruning workshop. The workshop is free, and organized by UpRoot Colorado in collaboration with Colorado Edible Forest, as well as CSU’s extension program.
Jennifer Nelson lives in Glenwood and works in healthcare. She is investing her time into learning how to maintain the health of her yard’s long-standing fruit trees. This workshop is her first with UpRoot, and she say's that she is excited to meet other gardeners with similar interests.
"I have four fruit trees downtown, and I need to know how to take better care of them. I don't want them to look scraggly. I want to have good produce," she said.
"We do a lot of canning and dehydrating, so just hoping to keep that going. They're really old trees, so I don't want them to die on my watch. Yeah, it's 120 year old house and the trees are probably 50 or 60 years old and I just want to keep them happy."
Enthusiastic students brave the wind, snuggling into their camp chairs as the lecture segment of the workshop begins. Shortly they’ll be practically applying their new skills to the apple orchard around them that is part of Orchard Creek Ranch. The property owner Kirsty says some of the trees hadn’t been touched for over 20 years when she first got to the ranch.
"It was big and long and gangly. There was so much dead wood between these trees, I really did not know it was in rows until we started cutting it," she said.
"And now some of these trees have reached very close to 100-years-old. They're about 80 to 100. When I got them they were 60 to 80. And this place was so wild. There was tall grass everywhere, there was barbed wire, there was trash. And this is what it like now with a lot, a lot of love and work. Across the way is a gal who's about 100 years old. She told me what kind of apples we have. We have double red delicious, which are the older trees back over here, they're similar to a Red Delicious, but these are crispy and they have better flavor. And we're organic also, just so you know that. And now we do apple picking every September at the end of September on weekends."
Thanks to patience and careful maintenance, the trees now produce nearly every year and are quite healthy despite their age. The property’s manager Luis oversees the wellbeing of the orchard, and assists with the production of apple cider, hemp products, and honey.
Kirsty says that the state of the orchard now is thanks to trial and error, as well as information available on the internet throughout the process.
Another no-cost workshop will be available in Basalt on March 23, and the intermediate hands-on experience for volunteers will be on March 30. That final session is the opportunity for volunteers to lend their new skills for the maintenance of Emma Townsite during the workshop.
You can get more information by emailing: vanessa@coloradoedibleforest.com.
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This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico including Aspen Public Radio.
