Pruning Fruit Trees

I got the opportunity to take a workshop on how to prune fruit trees! Here are the notes I took during that workshop. This advice is somewhat specific to the Midwest/ NE Ohio

Philosophy of Pruning

• More Light and Air
• More light means more fruit
• Good airflow prevents disease
• Control/promote growth
• Trees want to be pruned
• Makes remaining fruit bigger and tastier because there is limited sugar

Disease

• Wipe down tools with alcohol between trees and especially when dealing with disease
• Remove old fruit, fruit is a disease vector
  • both mummified fruit still on the branches, and also fruit on the ground
• Black nut
  • Looks like a burnt tumor
  • Can kill an entire tree
  • Always prune before anything else, remove at minimum the diseased portion of the branch
• Cytospora Canker (I think? I may have misheard)
  • looks like a messed up drippy branch
  • not as big a deal

Timing

• ideally, prune before dry spell
  • the forcast should show no rain for the next 3-ish days
• Prune early to get the growth done before fruit time
• Put compost around tree in the fall.

Biennial bearing

• Sometimes you get a lot of fruit one year and almost none the next year.
• Cut off half the blooms. Breaks the cycle of extra.
• When to do this depends on what they did last year, it’s a vibe. you’ll get to know your trees.

Tree Shapes

It’s really hard to convert between the two, you have to kinda commit.

• Vase
  • open center
  • classic fruit tree shape
  • common in home orchards
  • good for short trees
• Central Leader
  • Christmas tree shape
  • branches in distinct layers
  • requires
    • a very straight trunk
    • no large splits in the main trunk
    • very horizontal branches

How to Actually Prune

• Don’t take out more than 1/3rd of tree per year
  • removing too much would shock the tree, which can reduce production or kill the tree
• Keep tree short for your convenience
  • If you need room to mow under the tree, it may also make sense to remove low hanging branches.
• Make flat smooth cuts
  • Motorized saw will make a more ragged cut, its smoother done by hand
• Cut right after a branching point.
• Think of it like a highway,
  • you can’t go from a 4 lane highway to a 1 lane highway, you have to go from a 4 to a 3 to a 2 to a 1
  • in the same way, you have to gradually reduce the branch size.
  • you also shouldn’t chop off a large branch so the highway just ends. ideally, there is a similar size branch right there for the energy to go into.
  • Energy needs somewhere to go. Not hard and fast rule though.
• For large cut, cut at an angle with the apex pointing towards where you want new branch to go.
• The base of a branch is wrinkly. it contains healing cells, cut after that part
• Keep tree balanced
• The tallest part will keep being the tallest part unless we stop it
• Neglected trees will have more drastic cuts, managed trees will have smaller cuts
• Very very hard to prune a tree so much it dies

Notes on specific kinds of trees

• Cherries are jerks, they want to get real tall
• Plums are susceptible to black nut (apples are also in NE Ohio).
• pears/apples tend to be central leaders
  • if you want them to be tall, central leader is great
  • if short, open center
  • they like to be upright

My Lessons

• Trees are very resilient, and difficult to harm as long as you don’t prune more than 1/3rd of the total tree
• Pruning make a tree healthier and produce more
• Pruning is not particularly hard, or time consuming. 5-10 minutes per year for a dwarf tree
• It’s about kinda knowing a tree and observing what it does when you prune it, over the years.

Overall, the whole process is was less scary than it seemed before!