How to Prevent Water Sprouts in Fruit Trees

The best time to prune fruit trees is in late winter or early spring while your trees are still dormant. When trees come out of dormancy missing a portion of their canopy, they will respond by growing new branches to replace those that were removed. Fruit trees store enough energy in the growing season to produce blossoms, leaves, and new fruit in the following spring. This stored energy in addition to a reduced canopy will allow your fruit tree to grow lots of large fruit, but it will also give your fruit tree lots of energy to grow. The new branches that results from your pruning efforts are called water sprouts. Each year these unproductive branches must be removed from apple and pear trees in order to make room for sunlight to penetrate the canopy so that fruit growing on mature fruiting spurs will collect enough energy to fully mature and ripen. Stone fruit, like peaches, apricots, plums, and cherries will produce fruit on water sprouts, but they must be tipped back so that they can support the fruit on these young branches. If you are tired of pruning water sprouts each year, you can prevent them.

Water sprouts can grow as long as ten feet in a single growing season, but they start out much smaller in the spring. New spring growth is herbaceous. This means it has not hardened off and become woody. While these water sprouts are in the herbaceous stage they can be removed easily by hand, without the use of hand pruners. Removing these water sprouts in the spring will eliminate one of the eight steps to correctly pruning your fruit trees.

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