Gardening: March is time to prune fruit trees

It’s time to think about getting fruit trees ready for spring. March is the best month to do pruning and if you are adventurous, grafting some scion wood to create your own orchards. Don’t have a clue on how to do that? Here are two upcoming events to get you started.

On March 10, the Spokane Edible Tree Project will be holding a hands-on pruning workshop at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection’s orchard in Spokane Valley near Central Valley High School. Arborists from Spirit Pruners will start with a discussion of the principles of pruning and then will break the group into teams to practice on some of the church’s restored apple and pear trees.

The edible tree project has been working with the church for the past three years to restore the church’s 70-plus-year-old trees and then harvest the fruit in the fall. In the past two years the project has picked and donated nearly 7 tons of apples to Second Harvest and Northwest Harvest.

This might also be a good opportunity to check out registering your backyard fruit trees for the edible tree project’s gleaning service. Homeowners can register their trees, and when the fruit is ripe, project volunteers will come and pick the tree. The tree owner will get training on how to care for their tree to ensure the fruit is of the high quality possible for donating.

On March 24, the Inland Northwest Food Network in cooperation with Dave Benscoter and the Whitman County Historical Society’s Lost and Heritage Apples of the Palouse Project will be offering a scion wood exchange at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection.

Scion wood stems are 1-year-old cuttings from a fruit tree that can be grafted onto new rootstocks. Multiple varieties of the same fruit can also be grafted onto single large trees. The type of rootstock controls the size of the tree (dwarf, semidwarf, full size) and helps with the resistance to some diseases.

The scion wood exchange will feature cuttings from dozens of different types of fruit trees, including some of the old apple varieties Benscoter has been collecting around the Palouse.

Benscoter has spent the past several years searching the Palouse for old trees and then searching through old county fair records, newspaper articles and old nursery catalogs to see what varieties were planted in the early days of the Palouse. His work so far has rediscovered three apple varieties around Steptoe Butte that had been lost to history.