Six years ago (give or take a month or two), we bought 5 bare-root fruit trees (apricot, nectarine, asian pear, & 2 plums) and 2 bare-root grapevines (red & green seedless). We dug through the impacted Sacramento clay, did our best to amend the soil, rigged a drip irrigation system, and plopped the little buggers down in their new homes. I periodically fussed at them, worried over them, read (minimally) about how to nurture them, but mostly I ignored them. Despite my inattention, they started to bear some great fruit about 3 years ago. At that point, I realized that I should make some effort to prune them every year...and learned that pruning would have best been started early on, before there were crazy branches everywhere. Each winter since, I have tried to do band-aid pruning, and every spring the tree branches still go nuts. Last year, the nectarine tree even lost several big branches under the weight of its own fruit. So today I decided to hack everything down to the bare minimum so that I can try to regain control of these trees.
Hopefully I haven't killed them.
So I am thinking that maybe I will use this as a starting over point for me too. It's 2011, and at New Year's I didn't even try to pretend to make any promises to break. Which saves me from the disappointment of flaking on yet another new year's resolution, but I think that if I don't try to inject at least a little bit of structure into my chaotic life at this point, 2011 will fly by with as much speed and with as little notice as 2010 did.
If only I knew where to start.
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