Now’s the time to prune fruit trees

Ifind it best to prune the last week of January or the first week of February, but you can now start pruning your fruit trees. If you have a lot of fruit trees, start early enough to finish by the end of January.

When it comes to pruning, there are some basic steps. The first step is to remove the dead, damaged and diseased branches. There is nothing worse than pruning a plant and it is looking good, only to find out one of the remaining branches is dead. Now you have a lopsided plant. You should always be on the lookout for dead, damaged and diseased branches on your plants. It is easier and safer for everyone to remove when you notice them on your plants.

Next, remove suckers and watersprouts. Suckers are shoots that arise from below the bud union, and watersprouts are very vigorous branches that grow very upright from branches in the tree. Often the leaf spacing is much greater on watersprouts than the leaf spacing on the rest of the plant. Most fruit trees, roses and shade trees are grafted onto a different plant than the desired plant on top. If you do not remove the suckers, the tree will grow into the rootstock tree. Dead, damaged, and diseased suckers and watersprouts should be pruned off the plant as soon as you notice them, you do not need to wait until winter.

The next step for fruit trees is to remove any branches that are rubbing or close to rubbing against another branch. We also want to remove any crossing branches. A crossing branch is a branch that goes from one side of the tree through the middle of the tree canopy. Crossing branches block sunlight and will probably become rubbing branches in the future. This completes the basic steps in pruning any plant or tree.

For fruit trees, if the branches are too close together, they need to be thinned out. If the branches are closer than a foot, one or more branches may need to be removed. Once the branches leaf out and new side branches form, they compete with each other for sunlight. This type of pruning is called thinning.

Now we need to renew the fruiting wood on fruit trees. If you remove all of the fruiting wood, you will not have fruit. If you never remove the fruiting wood, it will mature and produce less fruit. The key is to balance tree growth with fruit production. The goal is partial removal of mature or fruiting wood and allowing new branches to grow.

Here are some guidelines for removing fruiting wood on various types of fruit trees.

Apples require little pruning after you have completed the basic pruning steps and then a little more thinning of the branches.

Peaches require the most pruning of all the common fruit trees. Generally, peach and nectarine trees are encouraged to grow wide once they have reached their mature size, so all upright growing branches need to be removed. Peaches and nectarines produce fruit only on the wood that grew last year. That means that half of last year’s growth needs to be removed from the tree this winter.

The wood that grew last year is called ‘’hangers’’ and is commonly green or reddish in color depending on the variety. If at least half of the hangers are not removed, your tree will overproduce. This means the tree will have small hard fruit, and will not produce enough new growth to produce fruit the following year.

As for the hangers, there are three types of cuts you will make. The first type of cut is to remove the entire hanger. The second type is shortening of the remaining hangers and the last is thinning out of the remaining hangers. All three types of cuts are made to reach the goal of removing at least 50 percent of all the hangers.

Apricots require heavy amounts of pruning. Between 50% and 80% of the long, vigorous shoots should be thinned out of the tree. Next, the remaining long shoots need to be headed back to half their current length. This will allow good light penetration and reduce the height of the tree. The fruiting wood of the apricot is mainly on short spurs with some fruitwood produced on the sides of some of the long branches. The fruiting wood can last three years on apricots. This means at least one-third of the fruiting wood should be pruned off the tree in order to rejuvenate the fruiting wood, the extra pruning is to insure good fruit quality and size.

European plums or prunes tend to have an upright growth habit and require thinning to allow light and air to penetrate into the tree. They also require some topping of the trees called heading back to lower the height of the tree. Plum fruiting wood is located mainly on short shoots or spurs. The fruiting wood is very difficult to identify, making it difficult to determine how long the spur will produce fruit. Like apples, by the time you remove the three D’s, suckers, watersprouts and crossing branches, your European plum trees may not require any more pruning or just some slight thinning.

Japanese plums require more pruning than European plums. Japanese plums are heavily thinned, with about 50 percent of the new growth removed from the tree each year. Thinning the tree is important in order to allow more light into the tree. The fruiting wood is on spurs that produce for five to eight years.

All plants, including fruit trees, do not require pruning seal, because it delays the healing of the pruning wounds. Applying white latex paint to the pruning cuts and exposed branches can be desirable. This will help prevent sunburn to the tree.