I thought I’d speak a little today on pruning fruit trees since it’s that time of year to prune the Apples, Pears and so on. The first thing you want is a fine hand saw crafted specifically for pruning trees and a good pair of hand pruners, NO weed whackers, no loppers, chainsaws need not apply! It's detrimentally important that you wash the blade of any tool with alcohol or bleach water before pruning or sawing a branch. Disease can be carried on your tools from tree to tree and cause sickness or death in some cases, so wash your tools well, I cannot stress this enough!

I'll began with apple trees; you have several varieties of apple trees, tall, medium dwarfed and dwarfed, if you have not pruned fruit trees before start with a dwarf size tree, no ladder is required and most of the branches are within reach. Step back and examine the shape of the tree for a few minutes, survey it's surroundings, which portions of the tree are getting the most sunlight and which portions are lacking light? The portions that receive and abundance of light reach toward the sun, are fuller and healthier, the portions that are receiving less light may lack leaves and may have smaller branches. Now, your cuts are going to do several things like promote healthy fruit, re-distribute energy to various parts of the tree that are lacking, create beautiful aesthetics and create new spurs to name a few. There are five "D's" to look for when examining the branches:

*Duplicate
*Deformed
*Diseased
*Downward
*Dead

The five D's are a good place to start. Deformed branches run amuck and will often be growing into the tree or rubbing against other branches they look aesthetically unpleasing and will not promote healthy fruit or leaves and may even cause damage to other branches. Diseased, branches are self explanatory as well as dead, start by removing any of these, examine the tree carefully for any fungus, this is important. Also, Plants, shrubs and trees have a natural shape you must find, most of the time it's a vase shape you are looking for so remove any dead wood you see and try to determine where the center of the tree is.

After examining your tree for the five D's, it's time to start pruning. With apple trees your going to want to bring more light into the center of the tree and have a fuller bottom so, more cuts in the center, less towards the bottom. Any shade producing branches from the center you are going to want to bring down so look for the tallest and weakest branches first, tall weak branches may eventually produce fruit but will bend over not being able to support the fruit and interfere with the health and growth of other branches as well as restrict light.

When pruning a branch, never cut into the collar of the branch where all the living cells are, disease can more readily enter in when the collar is cut too close jeopardizing the life of the branch or tree. Instead, count 3-4 buds up from the collar and look for and "upward" bud, not a downward bud the object is to create spurs that branch up and out toward the sun, cutting at a downward bud will cause the spurs to grow downward and into other branches.

Look for duplicate branches or "rabbit ears", leave one longer perhaps cutting at the fifth or six sixth bud, cut the other perhaps to the third, this way the branches will not be competing against each other. The tree should looked textured with branches in close proximately cut at different lengths to keep branches from competing, no buzz cuts!


Examine the tree carefully and often, step back and look at what you are doing, if you see 4 branches shooting out of the end for instance you may want to make a bigger cut. Make sure your cuts are straight and not diagonal, this is very important in the development of the branch. well, 'nuff for now, I'll write more on this later, it's time to go prune some fruit trees!


Michael