How to Prune Fruit Trees to Keep Them Tidy and Productive

If you have fruit trees growing in your garden, you should prune them at least once a year. This will ensure that your trees maintain good health and also a manageable shape. Plus, proper pruning will ensure that your trees provide plenty of fruit.

To keep the fruit trees tidy and productive, we will prune them once a year. When would be the best time?

Most fruit trees are deciduous, which means they lose their leaves every year and go dormant. The dormant period is the best time to prune a tree. In most climate zones, this is in the winter or very early spring.

To make this job easier, there are three basic steps to successfully pruning your fruit trees.

Let’s delve into these three steps in more detail.

Removing Dead and Diseased Wood

The first step to pruning a fruit tree is to remove any dead, damaged, or diseased branches. This should be fairly easy as dead branches are not difficult to spot.

If you’re not sure whether a branch is dead or not, there’s an easy way to tell. All you have to do is scrape back a tiny amount of bark with your fingernail or the blade of your secateurs. Then, look at the branch under the bark. If it still shows signs of green, then the branch is not dead. A dead branch will be completely brown and dry.

If you have a grafted tree, you might notice some branches growing out of the trunk from beneath the graft. These are part of the rootstock and will not fruit. These should always be removed and can be cut any time of the year.

Make sure you cut these in line with the trunk of the tree so that they can’t regrow. If you don’t cut them off, they will take away some of the energy that the tree would otherwise be using to produce fruit.

Thinning Out Overgrown Branches

This is an important step that allows more air and light into the tree and helps to give it a better shape. Because we’re opening up the center of the tree, there’s much less likelihood of your tree being susceptible to pests and diseases.

When thinning out the branches, there are certain things to look out for. You want to remove the following types of branches:

Any branches that are growing downward. Fruiting branches should be reaching up to the sun as the fruit will be much sweeter and more abundant.
Branches that are growing towards the trunk rather than outwards. Inwardly growing branches will crowd the center of the tree and won’t be as productive.
Any branches that cross over the path of another branch. Once again, these branches will crowd the center of the tree and reduce the amount of air and light that gets through.

While you’re pruning out these branches, take a step back every once in a while and look at the general shape of the tree. Well-pruned fruit trees should have the general shape of a vase, with a few strong upright branches that have smaller outwardly growing branches off these.

The leader branches should connect to the central trunk at a 2 o’clock or 10 o’clock angle. This gives these branches additional strength and means that they won’t break if they’re heavily laden with fruit.

The center of the tree should be fairly open and never be overcrowded with crisscrossing branches. Once you get the general shape of the tree right, it should be fairly easy to maintain.

Remember to cut off branches as close to where they come off another one as possible. Try not to leave any small stumps as these will die back and allow spaces for disease to enter.

Heading Back

Heading back is like giving your tree a haircut as you’ll be cutting back a portion of last season’s growth. The benefit of this haircut is to keep the tree looking tidy and to encourage the remaining branches to thicken and grow stronger.

To do this successfully, you want to identify the previous season’s growth. This new growth will be slightly lighter in color than older growth. After a little practice, you should be able to identify this new growth fairly easily.

Once you’ve identified the new growth, cut it back by about 20 or 30 percent from the tip of the branch. When cutting back these branches make sure that you make the cut just above an emerging bud. Be careful not to damage the bud though.

It’s ideal if you locate an outwardly growing bud for these cuts as this will help to improve the shape of your tree. If this is not cut, a new branch will eventually grow from this bud in the direction that the bud is pointing.

Furthermore, try to angle the cut in the direction of the bud. Therefore, if a bud is pointing to the right, you should angle the cut slightly downward so that the top of the cut is just above the newly forming bud and the bottom of the cut is almost level with the bud.

Final Thoughts

Now you know exactly how to prune your fruit trees to give them both shape and to get them to provide you with a bumper crop.

The most important thing to remember is to make sure that the center of the tree has plenty of space to let air and sunlight in. Ensure that there are no overlapping branches that rub against each other and cause damage to the wood or the fruit.

Now all that’s left to do is to give your trees a good dose of organic fertilizer to get them ready for the growing season.