Project cargo bike is finally complete, and pruning outings on Babs are a go-go!

After buying this ebike second-hand, making the biggest box it would countenance out of reclaimed plywood, varnishing it with scavenged gloss, and accidentally ordering a tarp cover that’s just ever so slightly too small… we’ve made it all come together! Special thanks to my partner who mercifully has one of the most comprehensive washer collections of all time.

For Babs’s first proper outing, I took her to a client here in Bristol to work on a crab apple tree. The tree had been given a bad ‘haircut’ last winter by someone who came in and just ‘topped and lopped’ it in order to bring the height down. Of course, the tree wants to be the size it’s meant to be, so it just grew a load of vertical watershoots in response. Whilst they can give the impression of a healthy-looking tree, these vigorous shoots congest the crown, are unlikely to bear fruit in the near future, and of course make managing the height of the tree even more tricky.

So we’ve instigated a regime of staged pruning interventions over this winter, next summer and next winter, in order to get this tree looking great again by gradually reshaping the crown and eventually getting on top of the watershoots – all with tree health at the front of our minds.

Happy days!