April visit 7

Mirabelle

My last task before leaving was to re-shape the mirabelle: I’d thought it was a sucker, and nearly chopped it down when we first saw it. It was only time pressure that prevented me. Luckily! M. Lorin said it was a seedling that was doing much better than the parent tree, and that we should remove the old, worn out, one as it no longer fruited very well.

He very kindly took his chain saw to it last summer (did I mention: I neeeed a chain saw?!), and pulled out the root with his tractor. But of course the sapling had grown away from the mother & was quite wonky, and a bit lanky. I’ve been debating whether to chop out the middle to leave just the bottom few branches (which have healthy new growth), and decided to ‘go for it’. I tried (lots of times) to knock in a metal stake to pull the tree to, in an effort to straighten the trunk, but no chance: there are just too many stones – I gave up after about 8 goes. Now, there’s an interesting (and, I hope, successful) Heath Robinson arrangement involving breezeblocks & baler twine (I finally found a decent length of the stuff, rather than the six to eight inch bits I had a huge collection of!). The tree is currently upright, but we shall have to see whether this will correct the bend, or whether I’ve left it too late. Time will tell….