How to prune your fruit trees - Another garden job for the Summer.
If you have a trained apple or pear tree - a cordon, espalier or cleverly shaped plant you’ll probably be very familiar with the concept of fruit tree pruning.
Summer pruning on untrained fruit trees is less common but if yours are grown on dwarfing stock (which is usually the case) pruning means your trees will be much easier to control and should produce better fruit. Bear in mind that if you have a tip bearing tree (where the fruit forms at the tip of the branches instead of short spurs along the branches) or your tree is a bit of a weakling, proceed with caution or put the pruners away altogether. If however you have a mature spur bearing fruit tree, covered in foliage pruning can proceed with enthusiasm!
Summer pruning can improve both the current year’s crop and next year’s harvest.
Have a good look at your tree before you get going, this year’s shoots will be pretty soft and are likely to be leafy and vigorous and covering any fruit that’s there. The fruit will benefit from less of this shade and more sunshine and air will increase sweetness and size, improve colour, make picking easier and make the microclimate less favourable for pests and diseases. Removing these shoots should also give you a better harvest the following year because it will encourage your fruit tree to produce even more fruit bearing spurs by pushing remaining buds to become fruit buds instead of leaf buds.
When you look at this year’s growth, you may see that the shoot ends with a growing point carrying a small, lighter green leaf - if so you’ll need to wait a bit longer, until the growing point is ‘set’. At this point, instead of the small, light green leaf, the shoot will carry all adult leaves. The wood at the bottom of the shoot will also be stiff and hard (this is described as ’signified’). If you don’t wait until this is the case you’ll end up with new leafy shoots.
When you prune, ignore any shoots less than about 20cm long as they’re likely to carry fruit buds naturally.
Cut back new shoots (laterals) more than 20cm (8in) long growing from the main stem to three leaves above the basal cluster of leaves. Cut back new shoots growing from existing sideshoots (sub-laterals) to one leaf above the basal cluster and remove any upright, vigorous growth completely. If any secondary growth occurs after this summer pruning, you can remove this by pruning your fruit trees again in September.