Lightly pruned the apple trees on the Ovantrask field. The trees up at Rosendal are beyond pruning.
Walked down to the back field, it is still frozen. We have plans to clear the spruce (half a dozen scattered trees) and use the back fields for making hay. The forest people have been and collected the wood pile they left after they cleared the Rosendal forest.
And the elk have been and cleared all the newly planted saplings. Great. Well, those nice crispy apples turned out to be eaters and not keepers. After just a couple of weeks they turned very floury and started to rot. The blackbirds had some of them and I stewed up the rest.
At least this might help us with the identificaiton process! This is one of the first apple trees we planted at Pojo and we have forgotten which variety it is. We spent hours trying to identify the apples with the help of the Nordic apple book but gave up. It might be Lobo. Anyway, they are ready to eat and delicious. We are still having problems keeping the deer off the fruit trees. The sheep only eat the windfalls which is OK, but the deer eat the fruit, leaves, branches... everything. If we completely surround the trees with wire then we can't get in to do the weeding and even picking the apples gets complicated. The early apples are ready to eat and the sheep are scoffing any that are in reach. The trees are slowly establishing themselves but it has taken time and much hard work. Every winter the deer do damage and the trees barely have time to recover before the next winter starts. We didn't keep very good records in the early days so we are not too sure which are which but we have "summer apples" (eg Kaneli, Pekka, Sandra) which are ready to eat now(ish) and "winter apples" which are for storage and are left on the trees for another month or so (eg Lobo). We have a really good apple book (thx, C&C) which has great pictures and is good for identifying UFOs (unidentified fallen objects). This week we have been removing the lower branches from the visakoivu.
The sheep are more than happy to eat the leaves off the fallen branches. We will dry out some of the bigger branches that we have removed to see if there are any "curly" patterns in the wood. We bought a red birch (Betula pubescens f. rubra) from Billnas nursery and planted it, in memory of my father, in front of the sauna down by the lake. A lovely spot with a beautiful view and sheltered from the wind. A quiet family moment. After a few years the tree will have white bark which contrasts beautifully against the dark red leaves, While the tree establishes itself we have staked it and surrounded it with fencing to keep the deer (and any stray sheep) away. The first red birch was found in Ostrabothnia in the 1970s and grown at the University of Oulu. It is a variety of downy birch (Betula pubescens). This is not the same sub-species as Red Bark Birch or Chinese Red Birch (Betula albosinensis) More info on Finnish Red Birch (punakoivu) from Suomalainen Taimi |