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Early last week, a friend, who knows my penchant to get in the car and go, asked me what I was up to. Before I could answer, he spotted my hands and told me that it was obvious.

Later that evening I picked up my copy of The Chronicle, and when I found what I had written last week I noticed that the tag line at the bottom now said that I was semi-retired. My hands wanted to protest, but the rest of me decided that that’s not a bad place to be.

Yes, I’m traveling more and am helping the kids, but I also have more time to garden and watch birds, two things that I have enjoyed all my life.

On March 26 I saw the ground in my garden was about right and I pulled my roto-tiller out of the barn. The ground worked really nicely. The next morning I made another pass with the tiller and planted peas. When I wanted a bit more tilled space for onions and spinach I found the ground too frozen to work, so I waited until after lunch to complete that day’s projects.

In the process, I found a short row of spinach I had planted last August. It looks west and took the brunt of what winter had to offer but looks quite promising. I will do that again this year.

A few hours later, in an Amish shop I visit, I told the proprietor about my day’s activities and he pleaded that I not tell his wife, because it was too cold to garden right then. I didn’t argue but my peas are sprouted and I bet his aren’t. It’s beginning to look like a late start this year.

Several days later, with input from the wife and kids, it was determined that I should plant 50 asparagus roots. I found another brief weather window and dug a trench a foot deep and wide and 52 feet long. Despite rather wet soil I put them in last Wednesday, just barely covering the plants.

I’d like a brief shower to settle the soil around the roots. When I see growth emerge, I will add a bit of dirt to cover it eventually filling the trench in the next month or two.

Beans, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce and beets are my targets in the next weather opportunity.

Another project underway is building an electric fence about my fledgling retirement orchard. For the first year I boxed my young trees with four pallets. Now the trees are too big for the pallets but too small totownship. If your martin houses aren’t up, get moving. On April 6, I added six new birds to my year’s list. At least the birds think spring is near. Spend a few minutes to enjoy the spring migration and the new arrivals in our yards.

As a small child I remember my grandfather helping dad and mom husk corn. My parents hoed a lot of strawberries and picked a lot of fruit and produce when I was getting started. Why shouldn’t my grandkids see me helping their parents at this point in life?

When I think of pruning, three things come to mind. That’s cuts to thin, cuts to tip or shorten branches and the horrible things you can do with a hedge sheers.

Let’s start with the one I obviously do not like. As you make those sculptured cuts with hedge shears you create a mass of short twigs. As they re-sprout and get wacked off again and again, the outer surface gets so dense that light cannot penetrate the center of the plant.

In time, the interior of the plant becomes a skeleton clothed in a thin layer of green. That’s not a serious problem until wind, snow, pet or human action breaks a limb or a limb dies. Getting re-growth from that interior skeleton is nearly impossible.

Also, if you are using a flowering shrub for a formal hedge or topiary you often have to choose between flower buds and neatness. Years ago I spotted two forsythia bushes, round as a ball, with a narrow band of flowers around the base. I will carry the vivid memory of bald-headed forsythias to my grave.

If you must hedge, let the hedge be wider at the bottom because that will make the most light available to the plant, somewhat mitigating some of the problems listed above.

Tipping, or shortening, branches is one approach to maintaining size on a plant. A better approach would be to pick a plant that fits the space rather than one than must be held in check.

When you tip you can almost always expect a whirl of branches to form just below the cut. This can be valuable if you are trying to set branches on a tree. This is regularly employed when training central leader (one stem) fruit trees, evergreens and the like.

A tipped branch will become stiffer, so tipping can be a tool to decrease drooping branches. When tipping, make cuts just above a bud at a 45 degree angle. If you tip randomly, not paying attention to the buds, you will leave stubs that die, inviting disease and insects. In the industry, they are called cloth hangers.

Cuts to thin remove whole branches or twigs from trees or shrubs and stems at ground level from multi-stemmed plants. This also can be effective in controlling a plant’s size as well as getting light into the interior of the plant.

Before you start, spend a few seconds looking at the structure of the tree or shrub. Look carefully at the victim branch and where it joins the branch you are keeping. You will notice a slightly enlarged ring. Sometimes, it almost looks like a ring of small pimples where the two branches join.

The secret is to cut as close to that ring as possible without damaging it. That ring contains the active growth cells that will quickly heal the pruning cut, limiting the time for disease and insect damage. Again no cloth hooks, please.

Correct pruning is not complicated. If you leave the branch growth rings in tack and produce no cloth hooks, you will soon be an expert. And I almost forgot, don’t worship the hedge trimmers.

Several days ago, while on one of my near daily search and discover missions in a storage area, I found my good pair of limb loppers. I picked them up and, before putting them down, I pumped them several times. They are ready for action after a rest from sometime last summer.

Since I like the natural look with my short needled evergreens (anti Christmas trees) and the apple trees in my home orchard are really young, the loppers’ first job will target the twig dogwoods that are scattered throughout my landscape. I like this plant for the brilliant winter stem color, an eye-catcher in the winter landscape.

With the twig dogwoods you have two pruning options. The easiest is to cut the whole plant nearly to the ground and get all new growth. My choice is to eliminate all second year growth at the ground level, since their twigs retain good color for two seasons. At this point in the winter it is easy to spot the aging (ugly) twigs.

If growing your own fruit is your thing, the pruners need to visit the apple, pear and sour cherry trees, the grape vines and the blueberry bushes soon. With apples and pears, remove the upright shoots that grew last year and thin enough to get light into the center of the tree. The best fruit will be on two year old branches that angle upward at 45 degrees.

Sour cherries need a minimum of annual thinning.

Grape vines are seldom pruned enough. At each leaf from last year a fruit bud formed which will produce a bunch of grapes this season. They should be very obvious now. A young or weak growing vine should be asked to produce about 30 bunches. The limit for the most vigorous vines should stay in the neighborhood of 50 fruit clusters. A correctly pruned grapevine looks naked.

Pruning blueberries is easy. They are multi-stemmed. Shoot for five to seven stems. Each spring remove the oldest stem at ground level. Examine the new suckers that formed last year. Keep the best one and remove the rest, and you are done.

As previously reported, I planted a few black raspberry vines last year for the first time. The literature suggests that the canes will produce a number of laterals. Each lateral should be shortened to about ten inches in the spring.

Amish along several of my frequent travel routes have what look like successful raspberry patches. I noted that they were all pruned in the last several days. Furthermore, it looks as if they pruned a bit more than the literature suggests. I guess I will just experiment.

It’s pruning season again, but unless it’s a hardy deciduous tree or something on the above list, be patient and your plant will be happier. I’ll be back with my ‘be patient’ list next week.

Photo courtesy of the Penn State extension. http://www.extension.org/pages/32434/grapes-production-pruning-grape-vines