This year one of our apple trees developed a serious lean, probably due to the sheer weight of fruit it produced. It was time to get out the secret weapon for straightening trees. The device is a cheap pull lift I bought some 25 years ago to lift out the engine of a mini (Series 1 with sliding windows!!) I was restoring.. It was however never used as in the end I dropped the whole subframe and removed the engine that way. Since then it has been moved around various garages and survived to be brought to France, where this was its second use.
The tree as it was
Attaching the puller
Slowly pulling
Is that enough??
The tree propped with a piece of Leylandii (They do have a use after all)
The prop will remain over the winter and into next spring and hopefully by that time the tree will be able to support itself.
The first time I used this technique was with our plum tree which was totally on its side. The tree is still vertical since we removed the props in early summer.
5 comments:
So now the leaning tree is Braced. (Been racking my brains, but that's the best pun I could come up with...)
My tree is upright but the weight of the apples pulled the branches right down. I am wondering what I should do before next year. As all the apples are at the end of the branch I do not want to over prune it. Diane
That's very good, Susan! Only wish we'd thought of it!
Diane, that's a tricky one - but I'd probably go for the pruning option. There again, Colin's cry is usually: "Look out! Here comes Edge the Prune" when he spots me out with the loppers, so perhaps I'm not the best person to be giving advice!
I expect that in the doing of this there were some moments of high tension .....
Oh Gaynor! You're on good form today!
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