3 Easy Steps to Winter Fruit Tree Pruning

With winter here, and bare-rooted fruit trees filling the nurseries, I wanted to guide you through my 3 Easy Steps to Pruning Fruit Trees.

Winter pruning your fruit trees keeps them healthy, productive, manageable and keeps them in good shape.  By following my 3 guidelines, you can have a tree pruned in under 15 minutes and be guaranteed fruit within reaching distance next summer. 

Guideline No. 1

Remove any dead, diseased and dying branches.  You don’t want any unhealthy limbs on your gorgeous tree.  If it’s a wonky, weird shaped branch, or there’s something oozing, you don’t have to think twice about it. Just get rid of it.

Guideline No. 2

Prune to a vase shape.

Remove any branches filling the centre of the tree.  You want the centre clear to encourage good air flow and light.

Prune any branches that are crossing over or rubbing against other limbs.

Remove any vertical growth.  Branches that grow vertically (ie are shooting for the sky) are water sprouts and don’t produce any fruit.  They’re unproductive energy sappers and should go.

When pruning the branches, prune back close to the main branch, but without damaging the “collar”.  This gives the branch enough surface area to heal properly.

Remember to keep all the cuts clean.  I LOVE the power tools so use a mini chainsaw for the larger branches and use long handled secateurs for the smaller branches. But a recipro saw would do the trick too.

Guideline No. 3

Keep the tree to a manageable size.

Fruit grows on the lside branches and not usually on the tippy top of the tree, so by keeping the height manageable you’ll not only make it easier to net, but you’ll also be able to reach the fruit without a cherry picker!

As I’m slightly vertically challenged, I prune most of my fruit trees to around 5 feet in winter.  The tree puts on a huge amount of growth when the weather warms up and keeping the tree to this height makes it easier to net and harvest.

If you can, encourage side branches as low to the ground as possible, instead of having a trunk and canopy, if you want to maximize the amount of fruit you get, just have the canopy. I try and get my branches to come sideways from 2ft off the ground. This makes the tree easier to net, easier to reach the fruit and you get more fruit doing this.

My final tip

If you’re planting a brand-new, bare-rooted fruit tree, be brave!  You’ve probably just bought the biggest, best-looking tree you could find, but after you’ve planted it in the hole, I want you to cut it back by half.  Gasp!  I know!  Trust me, your future self will thank you.  I have experimented with this and planted two fruit trees at the same time.  One I left unpruned, the other I cut back by half.  Results:  The unpruned tree hardly grew, it only survived and maintained the leaves on the existing branches.   The pruned fruit tree skyrocketed.  It not only grew back to its original size but grew another 2 feet on top of that!  So, be brave and be bold.

I also have a couple of YouTube videos on Fruit Tree Pruning which shows how quickly and easily you can shape your trees. Click on the links below to see me in action.