Ahh- To Prune Again

We've been pruning in the apples for the last couple of days now. How lovely to be outside and have the sun shining! The snow pack has melted substantially, but it is suprising to see that it is still a couple off feet deep where it really drifted in the orchards. Our orchard ladders, which we carefully laid on the ground but propped up on some prunings before all this snow came, have still not appeared through the drifts. As luck has it, it looks like the biggest drifts are exactly where we left our ladders. We like to prune a whole tree at a time from the bottom to the top with a person on either side of the row. If it is really windy or wet we sometimes just do the bottoms, then come back later to do the tops. It's no fun being blown off a ladder or getting your gloves wet or muddy when it is cold out. So, since we couldn't get up to the ladders we've been working on the bottoms of the trees where we can get to them. We're still walking on a fair amount of snow and have skipped over some areas because the lower scaffold limbs of the trees are still drifted over. I think we could have lost a VW Beetle in some of the deepest drifts between the apple and peace orchards this year. Yesterday I got our van stuck in the snow still left in the access road. I thought I could blast through what I thought was 5" of snow tot the bare spot 40' away. Turns out it was more like 16" deep. We'll talk up today and take a couple of shovels so we can get the van out and find the buried ladders too. I drove to Downingtown a couple of days ago and was quite surprised to see the snow was almost all gone there. With these temps and some sun shine it's just a matter of time. I bet come July and August we'll be thinking more fondly of snow piles.
Karen