fruit-tree pruning: a future investment

21.07.2023 - 23:10 / awaytogarden.com

TODAY DWARF AND SEMI-DWARF varieties of apples and other fruit trees are the norm, but when the half-dozen or so apple trees that remain from the old, old orchard I garden in were planted, the norm was full-size or standard trees. Their shapes were barely visible when I bought the property, overgrown with a combination of their own unnecessary, thicket-like growth and miles of multiflora roses and grapevines.

Over a course of three years, the trees were brought back to some state of civility. This required aggressively employing two basic methods, which you, too, can use to improve the shape and yield of an overgrown fruit tree.

The time is now.First, each and every year, remove all the water sprouts or suckers—thin, whip-like wood that juts straight up from the main limbs but could never support any fruit—with a folding saw or pruning shears, by cutting down to the supporting branch and leaving behind no trace of the sucker or its swollen base. You can see the unpruned old trees in the picture at left; that’s the same tree as up top, but unpruned.

A detail of vertical sprouts (in an old magnolia, not an apple) is below that, with blue-sky background: You’d remove the four distinctly upright shoots in mid-photo and just to the left of that.Then there’s the hard part: taking out big branches. Step back and evaluate the tree, or even better take pictures.

One of the great things about the digital age: You don’t have to make duplicate sets of prints of your photos, like I used to do before drawing on one set as if to graphically “prune” out some wood before making any real cuts. With your favorite photo-editing program likePicmonkey or Photoshop Elements, black out the branches you think the tree would eventually be better