Its March, and the growing season is upon us. A key activity we have to undertake in our garden in Spring, is the dreaded “pruning”. Some thoughts on pruning trees and the parallels to our life.
Ever since I started growing strawberries in the aerogarden, I’ve started to understand the concept of pruning. By the by, growing strawberries are really a labor of love since strawberries take forever to fruit. I learned a lot but definitely not something I’m going to keep on doing. I would have a ton of tomatoes instead of the ~50-60 strawberries we have gotten over this growing season.
But growing strawberries is interesting because you have to prune off the non fruiting buds and weaker leaves in order that the plant would thrive and survive. The plant has a finite amount of resources to invest into growth, and if that finite amount of resources goes towards a weaker and non fruiting bud or leaves which are yellowing, the plant has less energy to invest into growth. In fact, pruning the weaker leaves will allow the plant to give fuller and bigger fruit. More than almost any other plant I’ve grown, strawberries are particularly sensitive and require constant pruning.
So now that the snow is slowly disappearing, I’m hiding in the house trying to ignore my responsibilities to my trees. Trees, like strawberries need the suckers and bad branches trimmed to allow the good branches to grow and thrive. If you are interested in learning to prune trees, the video below is a great resource. If you like it, also look at the rest of the videos in the series.
Life has great parallels to pruning. We gather clutter, a sort of “life dust” as we travel through life. Little non flowering buds grow on the branch of life. If these grow, they draw energy away from the things we really want to do, to accomplish in life. Now, this is not fatal by any stretch, but for our tree to grow stronger, we ought to prune these unfruitful branches so we can focus our energies on the things that matter.
Another parallel are mature branches – branches that have completed their growth cycle. These branches also ought to be pruned back so that we can focus on those things that are growing. I think of things like cooking or DIY home repair, where there is vigorous growth in learning in certain periods of life. But once it matures, and you get to a stable state, then you prune it back, and spend more time on learning new skills. That is not to say you drop it like a hot potato! Rather that you prune it back to allow another area to grow.
We are lifelong learners, so we will always have new branches growing, but lets focus our energies on the primary braches, the branches of family, friends and purpose. Prune the other branches where they interfere with or reduce the energies we have for those primary branches.
Interesting how many parallels we find in life, right?!