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Practical help for the home orchardist |
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Practical help for the home orchardist |
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The Apple Doc's Tips on Pruning… So, you have a few apple trees in your back
yard or an old garden orchard out next to the barn. There are several things to need to consider before you climb the tree with your hand saw. What are your goals for your tree or small orchard? Are you trying to grow a lot of apples? Are only interested in the bloom in the spring? Are you tired of raking all those darn apples up in the fall and having to dump them somewhere? Tired of whacking your head on that low limb when mowing the lawn? After you have decided your goals, a few pointers on pruning. When cutting out a selected branch, follow back along the branch to a fork or all the way back to the trunk. Make a clean cut and try not to leave a stub. Stubs usually die and make a good place for diseases and insects to gain a foothold. When making cuts larger than two inches in diameter, make a shallow (a quarter of the branch diameter) cut underneath the branch, then go to the top side of the branch and finish the cut. This will help prevent the bark from tearing. I’ll make a few assumptions about our hypothetical apple tree before picking up my pruning saw (or chain saw for the really challenging job). We have before us a medium to large, mature MacIntosh that probably hasn’t been pruned in a few (I’m being polite here) years. It’s tall, overcrowded, but in relatively good health. My goals are to have an attractive bloom, a reasonable crop of apples, maintain good tree health, and consider the health and well being of the owner. The first things we look to remove are dead or broken limbs. This is the simplest (no brainer) decision in the pruning process. It’s dead or broken, you get rid of it, ‘nuf said.
Now, our tree may not look real pretty, It will
take three winters worth of pruning to get a neglected tree back into
shape. You don’t want to make all of the major cuts all in one year,
this could shock the tree too much and do more harm than good. Having said
that, most beginning pruners usually underprune out of fear of doing too
much. A healthy tree, under most circumstances, is very resilient and
“forgiving” of mistakes (I am speaking from personal experience here). |
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You’ve been looking
at them for a few years, wanting to do something with them, but not sure
what. Where do you start? When do you start? How much do you prune out?
Why start at all?
Now we have to think and make choices. First we look
for limbs that are grossly out of balance with the rest of the tree. What
I would like to see resembles a haystack or a big squat Christmas tree,
with longer limbs at the bottom and shorter limbs at the top. Long limbs
at the top need to be shortened or removed. Next we look for excessively
droopy and poorly growing limbs, which are more prone to develop disease
and die-back. There are probably a large number of suckers growing off the
upper portion of the trunk that have developed into what may look like
small trees in their own right. They are a tangled mess and are blocking
light penetration to the bottom of the tree. I like leaving one of these
suckers as a sort of “pressure release valve” when doing serious
pruning. Pruning is an invigorating procedure, and giving a place for that
energy to go may help reduce the pruning you do next winter.