Pruning Fruit Trees

Pruning your fruit tree’s is just as important as pruning anything else in the garden. If you want a good production of fruit you have to manage them just like all other garden fruits and vegetables. We hosted a class on pruning fruit trees this past week with a guest speaker, Sherri Crabtree from Kentucky State University. Her and an assistant came down and walked us through the process of taking off any damaged and unhealthy limbs, as well as limbs growing in the wrong place or direction.

We all want our gardens to look picture perfect as well as to produce the most possible. In order for that to happen we must manage them as much as possible with caring for the soil, putting the right nutrients in the ground, placing them evenly throughout the space worked up for them, watering, and pruning are major factors as well. The same goes for our fruit tree’s.

  Yes your fruit tree’s need the same things as your garden vegetables do. You have to space them out according to the height and width the tree will be at full growth. They need regular maintenance too. Fertilize, (preferably organic) or that is what we use on ours, but you should already know this. water, pruning, and yes of course bug control. They can also run into disease. If you’re not careful, you can lose them to fungal disease quickly. As we found out we have a bit of fungal leaf curl on our peach tree’s 🙁  . The good thing is we identified it early, so now we can treat it and get it under control. Copper is one of the best organic remedies for our problem, so we have started our treatment.

We want to keep our tree’s pruned in an open, and airy environment. Any thing growing straight up, out, or down needs to be removed. The goal of a mass producing fruit tree is for it to grow in an open oval shape so that air can freely flow in and through the branches and leaves. If it get clustered with to many branches it can not breathe well and will not produce as much as it should, or that it is capable of. You can actually cut up to 40% of a fruit tree without harming it. This is good to know if you have never pruned you tree’s up to this point. So if your tree’s are not producing what you think they are capable of, fill free to give them a hair cut. I assure you that you will be amazed by next years harvest.