Fruit Tree Pruning Starts With Where the Crop Forms

Where a tree carries its fruit decides which wood you can cut and which you must protect. Get this backwards and the tree blooms fine but barely fruits, because you removed the very wood that would have carried the crop.

A spur bearer like an apple tree or a standard pear tree fruits on short, stubby spurs that keep producing for years, so it wants thinning cuts that open the canopy while keeping that older fruiting wood.

A shoot bearer like a peach tree fruits on last year's pencil-thick shoots, so it needs the opposite, steady removal of old gray wood to force the fresh shoots that carry next year's fruit. When you are unsure, tie ribbon on a few branches that fruited this year and study them bare in winter.

Fruit only ripens well on wood that gets direct sun, so the structural goal of every cut is an open, light-filled tree. The old orchard test still holds. You should be able to toss a hat through the center and have it pass without snagging.

Pick one framework and prune toward it every year rather than switching styles. A central leader, one main trunk with tiers of side branches, suits an upright apple tree or pear tree, while an open center of three to five limbs angled out like a vase suits a spreading peach tree.

Whichever you choose, keep the main scaffold branches at a wide 45 to 60 degree angle from the trunk, since a narrow crotch splits under a heavy crop.

The first pass is the easy one, because you are only removing wood that clearly does not belong. Clearing it first also makes the structural decisions easier to see once the clutter is gone.

Dead wood is gray and brittle, and a fingernail scratch shows tan instead of green underneath. Diseased limbs carry cankers, sunken spots, or blackened leaves clinging in winter, so cut several inches into healthy wood and wipe the blade with alcohol before the next cut.

Then take one of any two branches that cross and rub, since the wound they open is a doorway for rot, and remove water sprouts and any limb growing straight up or down.

Winter shapes the tree and summer calms it, so the two seasons do different jobs. The heavy structural work belongs in late winter while the tree is dormant, once the coldest spells have passed so the wounds heal as the sap rises.

Summer pruning is a tool, not a chore. Taking some of the leafy new shoots in midsummer lets light into the canopy and slows an over-vigorous tree, though it trades away a little of that year's stored energy.

Citrus is the exception that follows the harvest instead of the frost, so shape a lemon lightly right after its main crop rather than in deep winter. A potted dwarf citrus follows the same after-harvest timing.

Late winter, dormant: The main structural pruning.

Midsummer: Thin leafy shoots to calm vigor and add light.

After harvest: Light shaping on citrus like lemons.

Just before a hard freeze: Do not prune, wait for the cold to pass.

Too many fruiting shoots gives you a mob of small, low-quality fruit and limbs that break under the weight. Thinning the wood, and later the fruit itself, pours the tree's energy into fewer, better pieces.

On a spur-bearing apple tree or pear tree, keep the strong spurs spaced along each limb and cut out the long, whippy water sprouts that carry none. On a shoot-bearing peach tree or a plum, shorten the vigorous one-year shoots and clear the weak, shaded ones, since anything thinner than a pencil rarely sets worthwhile fruit.

After a heavy structural prune, thin the young fruit at set too so the remaining crop is not crowded.

Most disappointing crops trace to a few pruning mistakes rather than mysterious tree problems. The biggest is simply cutting off the wood that would have bloomed, which is why reading the bearing habit comes first.

Over-thinning is the next, since stripping nearly every new shoot on a vigorous fig trades fruit for endless leafy whips. Heavy cuts late in the growing season push tender growth that winter kills, and leaving stubs instead of cutting just outside the swollen branch collar slows healing and invites rot.

If a tree blooms well but sets little fruit, the cause is usually frost, poor pollination, or drought rather than the pruning, so check pollination and follow deep watering through bloom.