A few minutes of attention in late winter will yield an abundant crop of healthy fruit. Using dirty, dull pruning shears to make cuts on a tree leaves it prone to disease. Hard pruning can trigger excessive growth that becomes difficult to manage. 1.Sterilize and sharpen your pruning shears. It is best to give the tree a light pruning every year instead of a hard pruning after having missed a few years. Peaches are different and fruit only on last season’s wood. Older ones without a plump bud can be removed. Look out for these to anticipate how much fruit to expect. These are fruit spurs with flower buds that, when pollinated, will swell into fruit.

Most fruit trees including apple, pear, plum, and cherry produce short stubby branches with a swollen bud. Next year some of the extra lateral branches can be removed. The buds below will produce lateral branches, creating a fuller tree. This last bud will grow into an outward growing shoot. This will create a tree with branches gently radiating up and away from the centre.įinally look at last year’s growth on the ends of the branches and head back by about 1/3 to an outward facing bud. Keep the height down by removing vertical branches at their origin or cutting back to a lateral shoot or to an outward facing bud. Then remove crossing branches and those growing towards the centre. Cut damaged, older and the least-productive stems back from where they originate, using pruning shears, loppers or a pruning saw. Cut back to a healthy bud or lateral branch. Prune approximately 10 percent of the limbs each winter to increase sunlight to the center of the tree and to encourage new growth, which in turn will produce more fruit. Check for live wood by scratching the bark to see if it is green and moist under the bark. The first step is to remove the “3 D’s”-dead, diseased, and damaged wood.

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