Summer Pruning Fruit Trees

Fruit trees will respond differently depending on when you prune them. In the summer fruit trees are hardening off their new spring growth and collecting solar energy to produce the sugars that they need to ripen fruit and store food for the dormant season. Pruning fruit trees in the summer can be beneficial, but it's not the optimal time to do the majority of your pruning.

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When pruned in the summer fruit trees will not respond the same way as they would in the winter, but if you are doing some summer pruning with the right purpose in mind, you will find that your fruit trees will become healthier and more productive. For example, young fruit trees that are becoming leggy and too long to support next year's fruit can be tipped back. If done early enough in the summer you may stimulate water sprouts to fork a year earlier than normal. By removing the terminal bud on new branches, those branches will send out additional branches that could become valuable fruit producing branches in future years.

Sometimes, fruit trees will produce so much new growth that the fruit found on last year's wood becomes shaded which can slow down the ripening process. Strategically pruning out new summer growth can aid in the ripening of fruit and will significantly improve the color of your fruit when ripe.

Summer pruning is usually reserved for correcting problems that cannot wait for the dormant season. For example, fire blight is a contagious disease that will spread throughout a tree in warm wet weather. If this disease is not removed from your tree when it is first discovered, it could cause irreversible damage and/or the death of a mature fruit tree.

Broken branches can also be removed anytime of the year and doing so can prevent those branches from becoming an easy target for disease.

Most of your pruning should be done in the late winter or early spring, but as you can see, there are many reasons why summer pruning can be beneficial.

Thanks for reading! To learn more about fruit tree pruning, please take our Free Fruit Tree Pruning Course, and please join our Backyard Fruit Growers Facebook Group where you can learn from other fruit tree growers about pruning, pest control, and other important tips on how to grow healthy fruit trees.