Pruning

I’m not much of a gardener. Generally, I plant every year out of obligation—I tried leaving our garden space fallow one year, only to come back from vacation to find weeds four feet high. It took longer to pull them all out than it would have been to tend the garden all summer. And we’ve never quite negated that year’s effects. Lesson learned.

Similarly, I should have been tending my fruit trees with a little more care. Last summer, we noticed how dead some of the branches were looking, but pruning them ourselves was a task more daunting than any of us could take on. We hired a professional. But a professional can only do so much when your trees are already dying. The peach tree didn’t make it. Despite our best efforts last year, we got no fruit and only a sad stump remains. I missed having fresh peaches this year.

Our apple tree, on the other hand, did a little better. The pruner topped the tree and took off all the dead wood, but warned us we may not have many years left with it. Half of what was left died, but the portion that remains bore the sweetest, best, and biggest fruit we have had in the decade we’ve lived here. Sixteen quarts of applesauce and numerous pies and cobblers resulted from half a tree. All thanks to a little pruning.

So this year I got braver. Not wanting our apple tree to suffer the same fate as its cousin, I read up a little on how to prune a tree. It was a lot simpler than I thought, though considerably time-consuming. I’ve pruned back our raspberry patch every year, so I wondered why it never occurred to me that I could use the same clippers to do the same thing for my other fruit-bearers. I spent a couple of hours cutting away all the unnecessary wood that would inhibit fruit growth. By the time I finished with the raspberries and grapes (this year’s permanent garden addition), I could barely move my right hand. But I’m hoping for payoff next year.

The thing I always forget during the times in between dreaded bouts of yardwork is how it provides me a chance for self-reflection. Over the years, I’ve become much like my trees. In many ways, I’ve become overgrown—allowing unnecessary things to crowd out the good things simply because I haven’t taken a little time to cut them back. How many interests and hobbies do I have that, while they are enjoyable, are not really profitable? How often do I have half-finished projects because there wasn’t room in my schedule to accommodate their completion? The ground below my apple tree is often cluttered with fruit that didn’t quite make it. Sounds like my workroom filled with unfinished sewing jobs, almost-done or ready-to-be-started crafts, and piles of things to someday be added into a scrapbook.

Pruning is hard work, and even a little painful sometimes, but then again, so is everything that gives us the best fruit. Pruning allows more light and space for growing fruit to reach its full potential. And it applies to human beings as well as plants. How many of my “projects” crowd out room for scripture study and prayer? How many evenings spent browsing the internet could be more profitably spent actually catching up on those scrapbooks or doing family history? And how often do I spend time around my children without really connecting with them simply because I think dinner or dishes need to be done first? I’m beginning to see now that it is time for me to prune back the things that clutter my life and do not bring any long-lasting results so that I can make room in my life for the things that will.

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