Of all the jobs Wally taught me to do, the one I enjoyed the most was pruning trees. The work felt constructive. I almost felt like an artist sculpting a tree. It was to a degree an art form, for one must not cut too much off but then one could not leave too much on either.
The Winesap seemed to be the tallest of the apple trees, they wanted to touch the sky. Wally liked to keep the trees no higher than what could be reached from a 14 foot ladder. There was several acres of Winesaps interspersed with Macintosh trees for cross pollination. The Red Delicious was a lower growing tree making them easier to prune, but  I spent most of my time in the Winesap block cutting tops off while standing on top of the ladder. The top didn’t always fall straight to the ground. It would fall into the branches underneath and then the battle would begin to extract it from its entanglement without damaging the tree. When the top was finished, the ladder accesses were tidied, the criss cross were cut out, and the limb density thinned, then move on to the next tree.

Wally never did teach me to prune any of the soft fruits though. I’m not sure why. He might have felt that I could do less damage in the apple trees. I do remember that our 16 foot ladder couldn’t reach the tops of the highest of the cherry trees.They would have been missed for there was a lot of work to do in the spring in getting all the trees ready for fruit production.