Lessons from My Garden: Pruning

I am not good at pruning.  It does not come naturally to me.
We don't have 3 or 4 strands of dress-up beads.  We have 35.
We don't have 5 or 6 balls.  We have 20.  No, 30.
The garage is overflowing.  We've never parked a car in there.
We will never own enough book shelves for all of our books.
And, many of our plants are unwieldy.

In the spring, when everything in the garden really took off, as they do at this time of year, I realized that, yes, the plum tree (newly planted a couple years back) could obviously use a pruning.  It's a young tree, and the small handful of branches that would need pruning were obvious and somewhat straightforward, even to me.  I felt okay about having learned this lesson with enough concrete, observable information.  And on this young tree, I felt I could figure out how and where to trim the few branches in question.

And then, fruit began to grow on these loooooong limbs.  A lot of fruit!  Fruit adds weight.  Hmmm.

J suggested propping them in some way.  Good idea.  Prop for now to save the fruit, prune at first chance, after we've devoured all the delicious fruit.

Well, as fruit grows, it gets... heavier, yes, heavier.
My propping was no match & those limbs busted loose, arching right down to the ground.
And, I found this.

But, it looks like there's still enough of the branch intact to continue to nourish the fruit.  Fingers crossed this branch, as well as the others, will make it a few more weeks.

Lesson #1:
It is a good idea to learn to prune.

Lesson #2:
Unpruned tree branches make really nice fairy houses, where really nice play happens.