Last weekend I was privileged to attend the Portland Home and Garden Show, and I am inspired! It was great to drive around and see green grass and daffodils and jonquils blooming … flower buds on trees ready to burst into color. I even planted broccoli and spinach in our son’s garden! Now I’m back to Minnesota and if there is only one advantage, I’ll get to see and do that as a replay. You can’t start planting yet, but you can appreciate this weather break to do some spring pruning. This is a great time to prune fruit trees, so let’s start there. Remember the late frost we had last May … it nearly eliminated the apple crop. Apple trees bear from the same "fruit spurs" indefinitely. If a spur has an apple on it this year, next year it will take a rest and set bud for the following year. Some varieties are known for this "every other year" abundant crop … other varieties are self-thinning and will produce every year without our intervention. Well, barring a repeat of last year’s frost, this is going to be the "abundant" crop year. This has two disadvantages: the tree produces too many apples … they are small and often the weight of the fruit results in branches breaking; second, you get more apples than you can use this year, and hardly any next year. So to break this cycle, we need to both prune and thin. Pruning is done now, removing the fast-growing "water sprouts" and keeping the tree structure open to allow light and air into the center of the tree. Consider that the best apples are usually on the top of the tree, the reason being that they get the most sun and air circulation. So pruning the tree to allow sunlight to penetrate through the canopy of the tree will, in effect, give the lower fruit the same advantage. Yes, hard pruning will result in less tree to produce, but the quality and size of the fruit that is produced will outweigh the loss from pruning.Thinning refers to eliminating the fruit on every other fruit spur. This can be done while the tree is in bloom or shortly after. You clip off just the blossom or fruit stem, not the spur from which they are growing. As a result, that spur develops flowers for the succeeding year, and the cycle is broken.Yes, that is going to take some time, but the payoff is annual production and better quality … it’s worth the effort. I have fun peeling a few big apples for an apple pie rather than a lot of little ones … and if you give your kids the opportunity to pick the apple they want, it will always be the biggest one … you get the picture!