Our friends at the Poplar Street Community Garden have sent us this message:
Join neighbors and friends in the Poplar Street Community Garden for our annual Apple-Tree Pruning event on Saturday, August 4th, noon-3 pm. Learn about fruit trees and their care, gain hands-on experience with pruning tools, climb ladders and/or help spot other climbers. Enjoy the Garden and maybe even pick some fresh apples! This event is ideal for adults and children 8 years and older.
FYI, these apple trees were planted about 1960, decades before the Garden was started. Standard-sized (not dwarf or semi-dwarf like many sold these days) and left untended for many years, they had grown very large and had produced many dead branches by 2002. That’s when early Garden members arranged for a NYC Parks Dept crew to start to clean them up and bring them down to manageable size. The work took ten years, having to be done slowly. In 2012, we called upon Trees New York to train us in pruning the trees for shape and yield, and we’ve been doing it ourselves ever since.
Children eight and older are invited.