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Posts Tagged ‘pruning’

Prune on the waning moon | Podar no Minguante

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Podar no Minguante, menos damasqueiros e morangueiros (prune on the waning moon, except for apricots and strawberries). So says February’s Agricultura/Jardinagem section in the Borda d’Ãgua, the Portuguese almanac that most people hereabouts seem to follow. So we’ve been following suit, especially since our neighbours told us that they’d also been informed that the February waning moon was the time to prune olives.

Olive pruning

Oonagh up the tree, Helen cutting the sawn branches into stove-sized lengths

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Pruning vines

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

With all the time lost in December and january to the torrential rains and getting our basic living accommodation in a habitable state, I’ve been keen to get on with pruning the large number of vines on the quinta. Last year we were only here for 2 weeks in January and I was only able to spur prune a handful of vines without really much of a clue as to what I was doing. I didn’t kill them though, so armed with that knowledge and a few techniques learned at a recent garden open-day in Barril de Alva, we’ve set about tackling the vines in earnest before the warming weather starts the sap rising.

With so many vines to do, it’s not really been possible to adhere to the bio-dynamic calendar, so we have just been proceeding on a daily basis for the last week. In any case, I’m not sure what days vine pruning should be done on. Most people say fruit days, but to my way of thinking, you’d want the vine’s energy concentrated in its roots if you’re going to be hacking large chunks off it above ground, so I’d be inclined to prune on a root day.

Double Guyot vine pruning

Double Guyot vine pruning

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Pruning the vines

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

To prune or not to prune …?

Having missed the autumn/early winter vine pruning window, which generally seems to be considered the best time for the job, I’ve been scouring Google, watching locals on their land, asking every fellow grower and permaculturist I’ve come across, and come to the resounding conclusion that, like just about everything else in Portugal, there are as many different opinions as there are possibilities and it’s ultimately down to you to make up your own mind and follow your own instincts for your own land.

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