Pruning Fruit Trees

[lupinfarm]

I have 3 Nectarine Trees, 2 Cherry Trees, 2 Pear Trees (smallllll), and 5 Apple trees..

2 of my apple trees are 1.5 years old and all the other trees were planted this past summer.

When and how should I prune my trees?

 

[dacjohns]

 

[savingdogs]

I'd go online or to a book store and purchase "Sunset Garden Book" for this year. It is a must have for gardeners and handles not only pruning fruit trees, but gives several options of how and why and lots of other great information too.

 

[rty007]

http://permaculture.wikia.com/wiki/Pruning_fruit_trees

http://permaculture.wikia.com/wiki/Fruit_tree_forms

 

[patandchickens]

I'd suggest waiting till the end of winter, i.e. don't do it yet.

Then get a good book on pruning fruit trees, or look online -- there are a million and a half perfectly good sources of the info, with ILLUSTRATIONS which is what you want. Siloam Orchards used to have some good links off their website, you could check there (www.siloamorchards.com). Your main aim at this point IMHO should be to get rid of branches that are crossing (or will soon cross) or that grow inward/upward as opposed to outwards/more-horizontal.

Biggest piece of advice I can give you for learning pruning, though, is to make the most important couple few cuts on a tree, then PUT DOWN THE LOPPERS AND WALK AWAY Come back a couple days later and take another look. Is there really something else you HAVE to remove? Fine. But most people (me included) find that there is definitely a pruning version of "when you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail"... and you cannot UNprune a branch

Your very small trees may in fact not need any pruning whatsoever right now. Even if they have some branches in the wrong place, e.g. too far down the trunk for what you eventually want, they will provide leaves and photosynthesis for the tree's growth. You can always remove them later. When in doubt, leave it there.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[Wolf-Kim]

I simply googled pruning and read a bunch before we did our peach tree. It had gotten so big that 25% of the limbs were dead. Looks like a completely different tree now, and so far so good it hasn't up and croaked on us. LOL

Basically what I got from the reading was wait until late winter. First cut off dead and diseased branches and limbs. Then off come the suckers, those little twigs that pop out along the base of the tree. For us, because the tree was nearing 15ft and peaches were out of reach, we started cutting the highest branches, most which had died anyway.

As far as the actual pruning, this is more of an art. So, my method of decided what lives and what dies, is selecting branches that are going to compromise other branches and removing them. Are there two branches running on the exact same path, above and below each other? This means the top branch is going to starve the bottom of sunlight, pick one and nix the other.

This is more what we had to deal with below, because the tree had never been pruned.

 

[sylvie]

Nice, Wolf-Kim!
I see apple trees that look like they are topped horizontally and wondered how that was done.

 

[enjoy the ride]

First I don't prune at all for a couple of years except to remove dead, diseased (!!!!) or broken branches.
Then, you can prune winter or summer for different reasons. Winter is good to get your general shape and branch orientation as you can clearly see it but summer is good for holding down the size if you need to do that (and the prunings can be fed to the goats for most trees.)

You need to know on what spurs your fruiting occurs and whether the spurs repeat fruit or don't. You don't what to prune off futer fruit.

On pears and some apples, I am relentless about water spouts ( the fast growing branches that sprout from the main branches and grow straight up.) Off they go each summer and to the goats.

If you have heavy snow loads you need to be careful about the angles that the branches make into the trunk and you don't want to have the tree split under the load. But horizontal branches produce the most fruit.

 

[Wolf-Kim]

Nice, Wolf-Kim!
I see apple trees that look like they are topped horizontally and wondered how that was done.

We only have one large peach tree. We did plant a couple of pear trees, two other type of fruits(can't remember FIL planted them) and a couple of small bushes that FIL says are fruit something or other. So, we prune by hand, standing on the ladder for the peach tree. LOL

I'm sure you get into those larger orchards, no doubt they have some machine they can just drive through the orchard and top all the trees off. But when you're dealing with hundreds of trees, I guess hand pruning is a bit time consuming. Especially in today's world where they trees have to be sprayed contstantly for something or other.

 

[Wolf-Kim]

Ask and google will retrieve.