Oregon Public Broadcasting

While most of the Northwest remains in the grip of winter, in farm country preparations are underway for spring.

Farmworkers are already in the frosty fields pruning fruit trees and grape vines. Pruning is a delicate job.  Doing it right makes the difference between a good harvest and a bad one.

Correspondent Anna King has this audio postcard from the hillside orchards of Central Washington.

Banda music pours out the open trunk of a bashed up red sedan. It’s parked amid rows of cherry trees. Here, on a farm just outside Benton City, Washington, three men work with tall aluminum ladders and clippers to prune away old branches.

Scott Williams slices open a grape vine bud to see if there is any frost damage. He manages a farm outside of Benton City, Washington.

Scott Williams: “Actually it does mark the beginning of spring.”

That’s Scott Williams. He’s the manager of this cherry farm and grape vineyard.

Scott Williams: “You know in the dead of winter if it’s really cold the workers are laying low and we’re finding things to do inside and are not really paying a whole lot of attention to the vineyard.  But once we start pruning, our work force ramps up a bit and things start getting done.”

Dead branches, vines that are too close to one another and non-fruiting limbs need to be cut away. Otherwise they’ll sap the tree’s strength.

These pruners have to be careful. Most of the fruit you eat comes from buds on second-year wood. Or branches that have been growing for two years.

Scott Williams: “The pruning is a balance between trimming off the older branches that are no longer productive because they don’t have very many buds and preserving the new wood that will develop the fruit a year from now.”

A worker cuts branches from a cherry tree outside of Benton City, Washington.

It will take months for Williams’ crew to complete this job.

Scott Williams: “Watch your step. You can see there are a lot of branches in the way.”

Scott Williams: “If you look like these trees that haven’t been pruned you can see that they look like a kid that needs a haircut. If you look at the trees that have been pruned, it still looks like the kid has a lot of hair, but he has a nice trim.”

Nearby at another orchard, Juvencio Garcia and his family are also pruning cherry trees. The icy wind whips their faces. They have four and five layers of sweatshirts on.

Juvencio Garcia: “Cutting like this, like this, this is not fruit....”

Garcia is explaining to me how he decides which branches should stay or go. He’s been doing this work for 20 years. He says he can teach someone in about a week how to be a good pruner. Other things he can’t teach.

Juvencio Garcia takes a short break from pruning cherry trees in an orchard just outside of Benton City, Washington.

Juvencio Garcia: “If someone comes to cut limb just like that, I don’t like him. They need to feel something for the tree. To do the job right.”

Garcia says orchard work is a good way of life for him. A reminder of his childhood in Mexico. He has watched these trees grow from young saplings, to give bins and bins of fruit. He feels at home among these trees.

Juvencio Garcia: “Like you know. This was my college. I don’t have a school. But I work in this type of job when I was very young. So for me, this was my college.”

In these Eastern Washington orchards the first buds should break about the end of March. Cherries will be ripening about the start of June.