Late winter - early spring and summer encourages regrowth, but not more growth. Pruning always nets less growth than you would've had without pruning. It just looks like more because it's coming out of less tree. Late summer does not encourage regrowth because you remove leaves at a time they should be storing energy in the roots and the tree is not in a regrowth mode. All proper pruning should encourage fruitfulness but may delay fruiting in young trees because you're keeping the tree smaller than it wants to be before it produces fruit. Any improper pruning can cut your fruit production, it doesn't matter what time of year, if you remove all your fruiting spurs/wood you will cut production. I do any major cuts that require a saw in Feb-Mar. I do shear cuts at any time spring to late summer. I've never heard of summer cuts encouraging disease (that would make espaliers disease prone and they're not). I've only heard of late fall causing winter injury (which can cover a lot of different problems) in areas that have harsh winter. I find it easier to see what I'm doing in summer. If I go heavy with shears in winter I inevitably cut off too many flowering buds. Late fall is also good for me since I can still tell which ones are flower buds plus with fewer leaves I can have a good idea of the structure, but since it's not good for the tree here I use string or twist ties to mark what to prune later.

Oh yeah, for those of us who get a winter, the plant appearance calendar is the only thing that gets us through. Those long days of summer seem a distant memory - it is a case of staying out as long as my feet can bear it (I swear, I am going to try battery feet warmers, despite the ridiculous costs). Garden work is mainly raking out brownly wilted leafage and the usual, endless weeding. The vegetable beds are easy - friable loamy soil that is easily tossed about with a flick of the fork but the perennials and such, require grubbing around with pointy sticks. Dandelions and hateful centranthus have joined mallows and couch grass on the rabid list - this horrid quartet insinuate themselves into the very centres of beloved miscanthus, asters and heleniums. A few years ago, I completely dug everything out, separating skeins of rhizomatous rootings - a long, cold and bloody task which worked for about 3 months till April. Gave up. Unnatural attrition and resigned neglect has seen off a number of iffy specimens and pale loiterers (callistemon, various salvias, even a couple of Phlox) leaving a Darwinian self-selected bunch of thug types which either ramp to enormous heights in about 3 weeks - fennel, rudbeckias, panicums or cover the ground in clumps of weed-blocking plantage (so goes the theory, ha!) such as heleniums, asters, monarda. I can generally get on top of it because it is a late starter on the plot. Nothing much happens in this patch till May but it really takes off with tanacetum, alstroemerias, verbascum, oriental poppies and a whole bunch of hardy annuals - red flax, Love-in-the mist, calendula, daylily leaves and tree paeonies. overlooked and by a huge freestanding R.moyessi. Not a subtle and refined space but moyessi holds the whole thing in equilibrium - deep red blooms in May/June and scarlet bottle-shaped heps in autumn - top rose. Once the late spring show is over, I wander off to other beds, pretty much ignoring it until the hooligans push and barge. It does look pretty good - nothing needs staking or falls over and a huge canopy of compositae types (and butterflies) have a moment in the sun. It then looks terrible. All those pictures of hoarfrost on foliage and seedheads are rubbish - what I get is a massive haystack of tough and sodden herbage which laughs at my enormous strimmer and is home to a zillion slugs. Still, this is my first couple of days since the Xmas couch-fest (apart from a bit of gentle seed-sowing) so obviously, I am rambling more than usual.....

TS - Not a bonsai calamondin, but one that stays the same size in the same size pot, using bonsai techniques. Unfortunately, citrus trees aren't winter hardy in MN, so a 6' tree in a 35-gal. pot would crowd out the sofa. Many Northerners who grow orchids balance limited indoor shelf space between fast-growing houseplants and more slowly-growing orchids. Toni, yes, the tree is in flower/fruit. It's 27" tall now, from the bottom of the pot to the top of the tree. As for removing the fruit, are there consequences one way or the other? I wouldn't care if there were ever fruit - it's the scent of the blossoms that does it for me. Hope that isn't heresy here. :) Thanks, Whitecat8

wbonesteel, I've never yet let a drought year keep me from having a garden, but I certainly have reached the point some years where I just stopped watering and let the garden sink or swim on its own. I also try to plan better now if we have drought before planting season even begins, and will plant less so that I have less to irrigate and will plant varieties with shorter DTMs so they can produce a harvest before the worst summer heat sets in. Sometimes it really isn't even the watering that is an issue---it is that extreme drought brings extreme fires and I stay too busy at times like that to even harvest the garden because I'm not home long enough to do it. If I am not at home enough to harvest, there's no point in running up a higher water bill watering a garden I'm too busy to step foot in. Fortunately, we only have that sort of really awful drought summer with rampant fires every now and then. If it was an issue every year, I'd have to either give up gardening or resign from the VFD because in the severe drought/wildfire years, I can't do both. I mulch like a crazy woman throughout the garden season. I scrounge up old spoiled hay, rake up bags of leaves in fall and winter and save them, use the grass catcher on the lawn mower to catch grass clippings to use for mulch, use bark mulch if I can get it, etc. One year some friends of ours brought me 60 bales of old hay. They didn't even call first---just showed up with a trailer load and said "here it is". It was in the springtime and I was thrilled. I thought that hay would last me forever, so I put it down thick on all the raised beds and in all the pathways, and used it up in one week. As I was spreading the last bale, I kept thinking to myself that I couldn't believe I'd already spread all that hay on the ground. Still, it gave me a good base of mulch and then I just kept piling on more stuff all summer long. That particular family didn't spray their fields with herbicides so I was able to use that hay without waiting a year or two to let any possible herbicide residues worktheir way out of the hay. Some years (the rainier ones) the mulch breaks down faster than I can replenish it. In dry years it is much slower to decompose, so I guess that is one good thing about dry years. Soil pH is always an issue for me because even our local water tests around 8.2 to 8.3. I add tons of compost and other organic matter and add magnesium. Correcting pH also is one of those never-ending chores, but in beds that I've worked with for a long time, the pH is a lot better now than it was when we first moved here. At least I feel like I've made progress in that area. Ants are hard to deal with. I try to leave the native fire ants alone because they will somehow either kill or drive off the imported fire ants. When imported fire ants get into my raised garden beds, I do try to get rid of them since I don't especially enjoy having them climbing all over me biting me. I use an organic fire ant product called Concern, which contains spinosad and that seems to work fairly well most years. It comes in fairly small bottles and we have acreage, so I order a case at a time. Some years I use Garrett Juice to which I've added orange oil. I have a bottle of Medina Orange Oil in my shed at all times because it is pretty useful for some types of pest control, although at stronger concentrations it is a herbicide (and at really strong concentrations it strips paint). We'll never be free of the fire ants though. All I try to do is keep them out of places where I grow things. Shelley, You're so much farther ahead in your planning than I am. My favorite spinach is plain old Bloomsdale Longstanding but I also like to grow the red-stemmed ones like Bordeaux. Bell peppers are pickier about the heat than hot peppers, but I usually manage to get a good first round of bell peppers in June just about the time I am making salsa. Those are from the first blossoms that formed on the plants. Then there sometimes is a fairly long period when the bells aren't producing much if the weather is really hot, but they always hang in there and start fruiting really well as the weather cools in late summer or early autumn. Blushing Beauty is one that produces really heavily for me even in hot weather, and I like to site my bells where they get only about 4-6 hours of direct sun. They produce better for me with that amount of light than they do with 10-12 hours of direct sunlight. Bell peppers just aren't crazy about our heat. The mini-bells produce all summer no matter what for me, kinda like cherry and other bite-sized tomatoes don't slow down in the heat. With a smaller garden, it can be hard to get enough tomatoes at one time to can them, but you can throw your paste tomatoes into freezer zip-lock bags after you harvest and wash them and freeze them whole. Just keep adding the paste tomatoes to zip-lock bags and freeze them until you have enough. When you get enough tomatoes to can, thaw them out and use them. I do it all the time. In 2012 when we had a ridiculously huge tomato harvest, I canned several hundred jars of tomato stuff (salsa, pizza sauce, tomato sauce, pasta sauce, catsup, chili base, etc.) and still had tons of tomatoes, so I froze enough to make 14 batches of salsa later on after we had used up some stuff and had empty canning jars again. In that case, I went ahead and processed the tomatoes, running them through the strainer and freezing them in the exact amount per gallon-sized freezer ziplock bag needed for a batch of salsa. You don't always have to can stuff when it is fresh. Some things can be frozen until you have enough to can, or until you have enough time to can them. Cucumbers can be tricky here because we have so many cucumber beetles that spread disease most years. I generally only grow the pickling types and I plant tons of them all at once so I can get all my pickle-making done in a fairly compact time period---usually a 4 to 8-week period. I grow County Fair every year because it is the most disease-tolerant cuke I've ever found, but I grew a couple of varieties that were new to me last year and they did equally well. Sumter, in particular, was a very heavy producer and was almost as disease-tolerant as County Fair. Some years I harvest the Armenian cucumbers (which technically are melons) small and pickle them. Bon, I grew luffas just for fun one year and they grew well and produced heavily. I try to grow something unusual like that every year. My favorite broomcorn is one that is sold as Mixed Colors. I think it is just a blend of a lot of OP broom corns in different colors. It grew 12-14 feet tall the first year I grew it. That was in a fairly rainy summer when everything did well with virtually no irrigation. It didn't get quite as large the second year, but it still grew well and looked pretty. I generally bundle the seed heads together and use them for autumn decorations. Dawn