Building fruit tree pruning skills
Building fruit tree pruning skills
Supporting the Orange ELF Community Garden
Local Links - Stronger Communities -
LLCI001-005
The issue
Central Tablelands Landcare was approached by the ELF community garden group in Orange to organise a fruit tree pruning training day for the volunteers at the community garden. This training was requested as the volunteer gardeners did not have the knowledge to prune the trees in their garden and many of the fruit trees at the community garden were in need of a prune.
The solution
Central Tablelands Landcare has in the past worked to support the Orange ELF Community Garden to host a range of workshops at the ELF gardens. These have included workshop topics such as an introduction Permaculture, building a food forest and building native bee hotels. All workshops have assisted both Landcare and the community garden group by attracting new members as well as providing important skills training for the participants.
In this case, one of Central Tablelands Landcare's casual staff members has had extensive experience in management of fruit orchards so it seemed logical that Central Tablelands Landcare worked with the community garden group to run the fruit tree pruning workshop. The workshop was open to both the community garden members and our general Landcare membership.
The impact
The fruit tree pruning workshop was well attended and attracted new members for both the community garden group and Landcare despite the cold winter conditions. Participants at the workshop got hands-on experience pruning a range of fruit trees as well as a detailed explanation of how to identify buds and what was the best shape to prune the trees to encourage better fruiting in the future.
As part of the workshop many of the fruit trees in the community garden were pruned by the participants and everyone went home with a better understanding of how to prune their own fruit trees.
It would be good in the future to host more regular workshops on fruit tree pruning - so that the community garden group and Landcare members could learn to prune a larger variety of fruit trees and so that the community garden fruit trees are maintained for easier picking and better fruit production into the future.
Key facts
- Gained new community garden members
- Upskilled community gardeners