Governing and pruning

Country Roads 
Evenings long with opportunity to read by the fire; days short and cold, perhaps wet, with plant life requiring pruning and protection — winter is a mixed blessing. If it weren’t for a seasonal break, farming would consume my life. And, if it weren’t for the animals and plants I would morph into something resembling a winter sloth. The animals wait while I exchange a warm bed for warm clothes including wool socks and sturdy LL Bean boots and tromp outside each morning.
Sometimes the chickens are still up on their perches near the coop ceiling but when they detect the feed can rattle they begin, like John Glenn, to contemplate and then execute their one giant leap for chickenkind, landing onto the floor.
Patrick, the wether lamb, is always pleased to pass through his doorway into the yard and, lifting his head to catch a whiff of new alfalfa, saunter in a straight line to a protected overhang where his feed waits.
On the other hoof, Posey, the ewe lamb, stares at me with a look like “Aren’t you here too early? I want to stay penned up for another hour and think about my day before I am into it.”  Some classical music might help?
What are the chores that should call all of us gardeners outside right now? Pruning fruit trees is on the calendar. If you have stone fruit, particularly peaches and nectarines, you need to remove at least one third of last year’s growth. The rosy red coloring of this growth will guide you. Do not remove more than that as this wood is your fruit bearing wood. These trees will bloom first, before apples and pears. You have more time to prune them (the pome fruit) as their fruit grows on old wood.
The other reason why you remove one third of new growth from stone fruit now relates to the trees’ need for a copper based spray to curtail peach leaf curl and you shouldn’t waste energy spraying tree branches you are going to remove. You are familiar with this fungal disease if you owned peach or nectarine trees last year. Rain exacerbates the problem. A tree with peach leaf curl usually loses all of the affected leaves, requiring reproduction of new foliage. Fruit quality as well as the overall health of the tree suffers.
The copper based spray should be applied three times: after leaf fall (usually after Thanksgiving); somewhere around Christmas (now); and close to Valentine’s Day. If you missed the first, don’t ignore the next two.
Vigilance in protecting citrus trees and summer perennials brings its own reward. Holiday lights strung within citrus trees are a merry reminder of the caring gardener who is imagining his grandchildrens’ summer lemonade stand. Row covering like Remay helps. If plants are frost burned, don’t remove the damage. That unsightly mess protects the live growth beneath.
As challenging as it is to leave a warm fire and home, that hour or more spent with the animals and orchard or simply in a garden continually grounds us with the dependable, predictable progression of days and seasons. When tasks or some portion of them are accomplished I find that lessons learned are reinforced by what I am reading.
To explain: someone who shall remain momentarily nameless writes:
“The deliberations of Congress are spun out to an immeasurable length … an immensity of time is spent unnecessarily … Every man in it is a great man, an orator, a critic, a statesman; and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism and his political abilities. I believe, if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics and mathematics; and then we should pass the resolution, unanimously, in the affirmative.”
Quote from Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York or Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky? Washington D.C., 2016 or 2017?
Wrong. The comment is from John Adams, lawyer and farmer from Braintree, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1774.
It’s disappointing, yet reassuring that some things, like governing and pruning never change but always require effort. 
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley