The basics of pruning fruit trees

by Doug
(in his garden)

Let’s deal briefly with fruit tree pruning and restoration. There are a few fairly simple things to understand.

The first is how any plant responds to pruning. And this video (if you haven’t seen it or absorbed it’s message - this is the single most important thing you need to know!) will show you how any fruit tree responds when you cut it in different places.



Does this work with fruit trees? Absolutely - this is what you need to know to prune any plant including fruit trees. And yes, I did say *any* plant.

But does it work with fruit tree renovation too? Yes. It does. No matter when you make the cut, the tree will respond in this kind of way.

Having said that - old branches will respond in slightly different ways if you make a bad cut. If you take a thinning cut and don’t do it properly on a mature branch, you’ll get a bunch of water-sprout types of growth from around the cut. This poor cut has left growth points and the tree responds by throwing up new shoots around the poor cut. The trick is to make good cuts (in other words the cut was a heading cut even though you thought you were doing a thinning cut - you didn’t take the cut quite far enough.)


So - once you understand this - you now need to know what shape you’re trying to create in your trees. Stay tuned.