Fruit trees also need pruning

By ED PERRY

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Over the past month, I've discussed the need for training and pruning landscape trees. Home garden deciduous fruit and nut trees also require careful early training and annual pruning if they are to remain vigorous and productive for many years. Pruning to control tree size and ensure production is done both now and during late spring and summer.

If you do not prune your trees enough, they will become too tall to harvest, even with a tall ladder. If you have an unpruned fruit tree in your garden, you know that most of the fruit grows in the top. Yearly pruning is necessary to keep the tree at a reasonable height, for instance, no more than 10 or 12 feet high. If your tree is already overgrown, you may want to reduce its height gradually, say over a two-year period.

The main objectives of pruning mature fruit trees are to reduce the number and increase the size of the potential crop, to develop new fruit wood, to remove interfering and broken branches and to contain tree height and spread for convenient harvest. Most fruit trees, when not pruned, produce more fruit than they can size and mature properly. You can prevent such overproduction with yearly pruning.

If you do not prune your fruit trees for several years, not only will they grow too tall, but they also become brushy and weak and stop producing satisfactory fruit wood. Some new fruit wood is necessary each year for most trees to keep producing good crops. Which wood becomes fruitful, and at what time, depends on the species of tree. For example, peach and nectarine trees bloom and bear fruit only on 1-year-old shoots (branches that grew the previous year). Therefore, they require heavy pruning each year to develop adequate fruit wood for the following year's crop.

Other fruit tree species, such as apples, apricots, cherries, pears and plums, bear fruit on growth called spurs. The number of years the spurs are able to bear fruit depends upon the species; for example, plum spurs may be fruitful for five to eight years; the spurs of apples, pears and cherries may be fruitful for up to 10 years. Assuming that your tree has spurs that will bear fruit for five years, heavy enough pruning to produce about one-fifth new spurs each year is necessary to keep your tree bearing properly.

Persimmons, many figs, quinces and pomegranates bear fruit on current season's growth. When you prune these trees, remove old and weak branches, leaving some younger branches to produce new growth and fruit the coming year. Overcrowding and lack of sunlight will cause branches to die, so you need to thin out some branches to allow light infiltration into the tree so that the fruit wood stays healthy.

Nut trees such as almonds and walnuts do not need as much pruning for height control as fruit trees. You harvest nuts by knocking them down with a long pole, rather than by hand picking, so the trees can be much taller.

The leaflet, "Fruit Trees: Training and Pruning Deciduous Trees" is available at our office for those interested in more detailed pruning information. Call 525-6800 for a copy, or pick one up at 3800 Cornucopia Way, Suite A (at Crows Landing and Service roads) in Modesto. Or you can download a copy by visiting our University of California publications Web site at http://anrcs.ucdavis.edu.

Ed Perry, a farm adviser with the UC Cooperative Extension, can be contacted at 525-6800 or ejperry@ucdavis.edu.