Lesson 6: Structural Pruning
Fruit trees need to be pruned every year, especially when they are young! The main purpose of pruning young trees is to establish a structure that will keep the tree healthy and productive for its entire life. For the first four or five years, don't focus on fruit. I know how hard that is, but fruit is secondary to structure. In this lesson we will discuss the eight steps of structural pruning. These steps are just a beginners guide and will give you a clear place to start and several areas of focus during the pruning process. As you become more proficient, you will be able to look at a tree and do all eight steps simultaneously.
This is the 6th part of a nine lesson pruning course. If you would like to start from the beginning, please follow this link:
If you would like to return to the previous lesson, please follow this link:
- Suckers
- Lower Two Branches and Leader
- Water Sprouts
- Four D's
- Crossing Branches
- Tipping
- Lions Tails and Weak Branches
- Balance
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| Start at the Bottom and Work Your Way Up |
Suckers
When pruning fruit trees, make sure you start from the bottom and work your way up to the tips. This will prevent accidentally pruning the same branch more than once, which will improve your efficiency as a fruit tree pruner. As discussed in a previous lesson, suckers are branches that grow from below the graft union. The first step to pruning young fruit trees is to inspect for and remove suckers. This is an easy step, because there is no guess work involved. If you see suckers cut them as low as you can. To prevent suckers from returning in the spring and summer, make sure that you pull them periodically throughout the season. Pulling suckers while they are still herbaceous is easy and will cause scar tissue to build up and eventually they will stop growing.
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| Suckers Are Branches that Grow Below the Graft Union |
Lower Two Branches and Leader
The best way to remember step two is to remember that it has two parts and the first part also includes the number two.
When trees are young, they will often start branching near the ground. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you want a small tree, but if you are growing trees where lawn mowers, tractors, or other equipment are being used, you will want the canopy to start two or three feet off the ground. In order to do this, you will need to slowly move the canopy up by removing the lower two branches every year. This will allow the canopy to get higher at a similar rate that the tree is growing.
The second part of step two is to remove the leader. Once the canopy is at your desired height, you can remove the leader. Removing the leader will stop the tree from getting taller in the middle of the tree and direct it to the secondary branches.
Step two only occurs while your tree is young. Once you have established the height of the canopy and removed the leader you can skip step two in the future. If you are growing a tree with a central leader intact, you can skip step two and continue with step three.
Water Sprouts
The next step to structural pruning is to remove or tip water sprouts. Regular pruning invigorates fruit trees and causes them to react by growing more water sprouts. You may not see them in the first few years of growth, but as larger branches are removed, more water sprouts will begin to appear. Most water sprouts will be removed, but in some instances, it is important to leave a few and tip them back so that they will fork and begin to develop spurs.
Water sprouts are left when a dead or broken branch needs to be removed and a hole in the tree needs to be filled in. As trees mature, their open center can allow too much light into the center causing sun burn on older mature bark tissue. By leaving a few water sprouts, you will allow a few leaves to shade mature branches.
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| Water Sprouts are One Year Old, Fast Growing, Vertical Branches |
Four D's
The best way to remember step four is to remember that four has four D's. In this step, we remove the dead, dying, diseased, or damaged branches. This step is easy, because the four D's are often easy to identify and require very little guess work. If it's dead, cut it out. If it's sick, remove it. If it's broken, it has no business staying.
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| Remove Broken Branches |
Crossing Branches
After removing the water sprouts in step three and the four D's in step four, you will be able to see the areas of the tree in which branches are too close together. When removing crossing branches you can move one offender, the other offender, or both. When my kids fight, I often send them both to their rooms even though they both think it's the others fault.
In addition to crossing branches, it is important to remove parallel branches or branches growing in towards the middle. In this step students often ask which one stays and which on goes? Well, if you have three parallel branches I will often take the middle, but other than that, it really doesn't make a difference as long as you are correcting the problem. If you don't, you will have to do it next year, and the longer you wait the harder it will be to make the cut.
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| Remove Crossing Branches |
Tipping
Tipping is very different than topping. Topping is the practice of cutting large branches without paying attention to nodes or forking branches. When large branches are removed without enough branches to support the stub left behind it will cause the branch to die or heal so slowly that the heart wood will begin to rot.
When we tip trees we are only removing younger, smaller branches that will heal quickly and invigorate the tree by growing new branches that will then replace the older branches in the future. Tipping will keep your tree young, healthy, and keep it at a manageable size. Every small branch will need to be tipped with exception to spurs.
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| Tip Back Branches to Promote Lateral Growth |
Lion's Tails and Weak Branches
At this point, you could walk away from your tree and be confident with your pruning job, but I often found myself thinning a few more branches from the tree. I noticed that there were branches that could not support the weight of the fruit because they were either too thin, or living buds were only found at the very tip of the branch. These branches without living lateral buds and only a few living buds at the end are called lion's tails.
Balance
When you are done with your pruning, you will need to step back and walk around your tree to see how balanced it is. When you step away from your tree, you will often find that the south and west sides of the tree have more branches than the north and east sides and will appear "heavy" on that side. If this is the case, you will want to thin a little bit more out of the heavy side and balance the look of the tree. Also, you might find that one side is a bit taller than the other. Again, you will want to tip the taller side back a bit to improve the tree's overall balance. This step has little to do with production, and a lot to do with aesthetics. Make sure your tree looks good when you are done.
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| Remove More Until Balanced |
You can complete your pruning by following each of these eight steps simultaneously, but sometimes it is less overwhelming to have step by step instructions. Sometimes the hardest part of pruning is knowing where to start. By structural pruning fruit trees when they are young, you will be giving your trees the best start that they can get in order to have long term health and productivity.
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Excellent review! Please keep the great work going.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind words!
DeleteGreat instructions!
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