After living in New York apartments the past four years I am thrilled to live in a house again. In a house with a yard! Bad and good news is that there aren’t too many flowers or bushes to take care of, and the yard work mainly consists of mowing the lawn. We are planning adding planter boxes and bringing flowers to the yard, but still keeping it simple.
However, the pride of the yard is an old pear tree.
Or it might be an apple tree.
A fruit tree nevertheless. And last weekend I decided to trim it only to be reminded why indeed apartment living was good for me.
Trimming the tree
I grew up next to an apple orchid and my aunt still makes the best apple jam in the world from the apples of my childhood apple trees, and I’m thrilled not just to have a cellar for storaging homemade jelly goodness, but also to have one fruit tree of my own. But the tree has been obviously neglected a few years, and even though I’m not an expert of any kind when it comes to gardening even I can see how this poor tree has been cut wrong too many times, and I’m wondering if it makes any fruits at all anymore.
I looked at the spring time apple trees in my parents’ neighborhood and they look like apple tree feng shui, or odd Nordic bonsai trees. They’ve all been cut and trimmed, and have no long thin branches, helping the tree to grow as many fruits as possible. The tree in our yard is thick with branches, and yes, would be an excellent sunshade and offer privacy to our yard with its long thin branches reaching into sky. But I don’t want a thick tree, I want to test my gardening skills and see if I can make this tree to make some fruits this fall.
I know that my efforts may be useless because who knows, maybe this tree is only for pretty blossoms and is for more decorative than for fruit purposes, but it didn’t stop me. I found tree cutters, a saw and branch cutters from the garden shed and off I went to start trimming this tree. I had watched a morning TV show about trimming trees, and had some sort of an idea what to do, but since the TV show was in Swedish, I might have misunderstood as well.
The first hour went fine. And when perhaps ¼ of the job was done, my husband joined me, because my hands were already killing me. Who knew sawing tree branches could hurt so much, especially after putting together IKEA furniture the entire day before. An hour later I was ready to have a coffee break, and before I was able to get the words out “I’m going to have a break, I’m exhausted,” I had somehow swung my left hand directly to the sharp end of the tree cutter. I was trying to give pressure for the wound hoping it was just a little scratch, but I knew how deeply it had to have gone according the pain and the size of the cutters.
Our coffee break turned into our first ER visit in Sweden. The visit was fast, I asked them simply use medical glue instead of stitches so we didn’t have to stay for long, and after a week it has healed just fine. It might be ready for more gardening work this weekend, but I had another freak finger cutting accident while I was fixing the door bell. Don’t ask, just one of those weeks.
Yes, I have been reminded that apartment living is easier, and why the apartment living had be appealing to us to begin with after living in houses with large yards. But I’m not going to give up. I’ve been focusing on home shopping this week, and today I’ll go buy gardening gloves, and give the tree trimming another try. Wish me luck.
