Tree Pruning Techniques

For Healthy and Productive Fruit Trees

Pruning fruit trees doesn't have to be fraught with anxiety; use these methods of pruning to keep your trees happy and producing for years to come.

Luckily, once your tree has been pruned into its scaffold, there is little for you to do, except yearly trimming to make the growth go where you want it.

The scaffold of the tree depends on having a vision of the growth and where it will sprout from.  In infancy, or a few years of growth past the grafting stage, the growth can be left to do its thing.  Once the tree has a few years of growth on it, then the shaping can begin.

Ideally, you will start with a young tree and shape it from an early age.  All is not lost if you get to it later on, but the smaller the branches that need to be cut off, the smaller the wounds that the tree has to heal.

It's important to learn where to make the cuts, especially if you're just starting out.  The collar, or where the branch joins to the trunk, is where the cut will heal from.  The collar looks like a sock all wrinkled up; prune above the sock and leave that behind.

Cutting off too much of the branch will mean a bigger area for the bark to grow over, and leaving a stub of a branch gives pathogens an easier entry way into the tree.

If you're unsure what you're doing, one way to start is to tie pieces of colored yarn around where you think you'll cut.  Leave these for a while, and look at the tree often, anticipating what will happen.  Will that branch grow in the right direction?  Is that the best branch to cut, or leave?

Professional arborists will make an undercut, especially on a large horizontal branch.  This prevents the bark from peeling off and the tree can heal it faster.

It used to be common practice to use tree paint, or to glob on wax or other materials in the theory that this would protect the cut area.  All this does is seal in bacteria, so it's no longer advised.

Clean sharp tools are essential to pruning success.