How do you take an old and overgrown fruit tree, or in my case two,
and prune it so it comes back to life and starts producing really well.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a
greener thumb. And this is a loquat tree. In fact, it's two loquat trees.
Now that's a special treat for me because at my old place,
that's the only fruit tree that was on that property at the original Epic
Gardening.
But over here at my new house I've got two huge loquat trees,
which is just cool. It's a nice little tieover from the old place.
Other reason I'm going to prune is I simply don't need that much fruit.
I want to cut this canopy down slightly.
There 's some really dead wood in here that I can use for firewood,
to bury as a Hugelkultur-style raised bed,
or to put in my Birdies garden beds to bulk up that soil a little bit.
So a lot of ways to use this material. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button for EPIC pruning tactics and let's get into the
video. Before you begin hacking away,
make sure you know the flower and fruit cycle of the plant that you're dealing
with. It's summer right now,
this is a fall flowering plant and it fruits early on in the spring,
like February here where I am in San Diego, California.
So I can even see rotten fruits on this tree.
I know it's well past its fruiting phase.
The flowering phase is still four or five months away.
So I'm fine in this middle window to give it the cuts that it needs to get it
down to size. First thing I noticed is that number one,
there's two main trunks coming out. This would be the younger one over here.
This one looks more, a little more established.
Then you've got these offshoots and loquat, as well as many other trees,
like to put these sort of low shoots out.
I believe they're called water sprouts. I don't know, in the case of loquat,
if that would have the same terminology.
But basically this is going to be low growth.
It's not going to do a whole lot as far as fruiting goes.
So I want to take my pruning shears and take these off,
but I also have to troubleshoot some of these larger pieces of wood in here.
So some Felco F2's will make short work of these branches,
which.
I don't want and don't need. I've noticed.
Loquat seems to compost very fast,
especially if you shred up the larger branches. So this will go into compost,
it'll go into just a chopped up mulch of sorts,
a lot of different ways I can use this without
just kind of throwing it away.
Because everything on this property I want to be repurposing for another use if
it's not going to be on the tree.
And here's a good example of a crossing branch. So there's a branch coming out,
you can see right over here,
and it's coming from inside here and we don't really need that. It's too low.
So we're going to take that off as well.
It's going to free up some air flow and just remove a relatively nonproductive
branch. Now take a look at this large trunk right here.
You can see some boring damage really close up.
So this doesn't look too healthy. And then my suspicions are confirmed.
If I move all the way up here, you can see there's just not even a top to it.
So someone's already made a cut here, it just hasn't come all the way down.
So what I want to do is come all the way down with a pruning saw and cut it
right there.
Same thing applies on this one right here. If we come up into the under-canopy.
We can see, nothing there.
So we might as well take it out and use it for something else. Oof,
that bark just comes right off.
Alright, timber, boom.
These branches here were putting out a couple of those water sprout style buds,
which I don't want.
If I don't want them then I probably don't need this material right here.
So I'm going to cut a little bit outside the branch collar, maybe an inch or so,
straight through. And you'll see how we treat these in just a second as well.
As I mentioned, I have two trees here effectively.
We've got this main one right here and then this one right here.
And I don't think I really want a lot of this growth again,
coming out from the bottom.
There's plenty of growth up top and plenty of new growth will develop up top.
So again,
I'm going to take off some of these lower branches just to sculpt
the plants a bit.
Here's a good example of one that's only ever going to grow in the under-canopy
of everything else. So what's the point?
Very similar with this one right here. Honestly,
I would almost say this entire one right here is following the same suit.
So you know what? I'm just gonna get a little extreme with it.
So we've come in with a saw and the shears and given it a nice cut down below.
Now what I want to do is pop into the canopy and start removing dead branches
that, just for some reason, didn't make it. Something diseased, pest-ridden.
Also just cleaning it up a little bit.
There's a lot of rotting fruit on the tree that I want to take off.
Just see if I can shape it a little bit. Cause again,
you have to think about how much of a fruit you actually want.
Loquats are one of my favorite fruits. However,
they are produced in abundance with only one tree, I have two,
and they take a long time to process. You have to cut them,
you have to pull the seeds out.
I pull the little seed sort of sheath or whatever it's called out as well.
And then I dehydrate them to store them for the long-term cause they don't keep
long. So where I'm going with this is I don't need 2000 per season.
I need maybe 200 to 300. And that's what I'm going to try to get down to.
As I was pruning,
I had to put down the pruning saw because I almost hit a little
surprise. Look at this! They're kind of swirling around my face right now.
Look at that, we've got a little swarm.
So I'm going to stay away from this section right here,
make my way over this way again.
I made some pretty good pruning cuts and cleaned this up a lot. Of course,
there's a little more to do.
I can go get nitpicky and get up in there and really take those dead fruits out,
those branches, snap them off. But I'm at a good stopping point for today.
What I want to do is now protect the plant.
So what I noticed was some decent sunburn on here,
especially as you see this particular trunk right here is getting blasted by the
sun as these new cuts that I've made - it's opening a wound on the plant.
So I want to protect what I have here. It's from IV Organic.
It's my friend Charles Malki. He sent this out.
I just recently had him on the podcast and he was nice enough to send out a care
package as well. And it's a tree-safe paint.
So you're white-washing the tree and giving it a coating to protect it against
sunburn, sun scald, all sorts of different things, even pests and diseases.
So I want to show you how I mix this up and we'll just literally paint it onto
the tree. Sounds crazy, but it helps quite a bit.
Inside our can you've got two components.
You have your powder component and you have your oil component.
Inside the oil is castor, cinnamon, clove, garlic, peppermint, rosemary,
and spearmint. And inside our powder ingredient we have iron oxide, limestone,
mica, milk, silica, methylcellulose and diatomaceous earth. What you do,
it's actually very simple, is you just take the powdered ingredients,
dump them in, make sure we get that all in there.
Here we go.
Take your oil-based ingredient. Uncap that,
mix that in, and it goes. I feel like I'm making a potion here guys.
And then in goes our water to top it off. There we go.
So you just fill it all the way up
and we're going to give it a nice healthy shake.
That should be good. Let's pop the cap back on, shake it up.
Now what we want to do is just come in and paint
directly over the surface of any cut edges and we're sealing it off.
So I'm going to do this to every single area that I cut,
which might take me a little bit. So see you on the other side.
I'd say it looks pretty good, don't you? We cleared up the undergrowth.
We cleared out a lot of these branches that were kind of going through the
interior and up into the canopy and just messing with the airflow.
There was a lot of avenue for pest and disease in there. It looks better.
I don't have to have as many loquats as the tree will actually support.
So there's a lot of things to do there.
And then finally we capped it off with that whitewash, tree-safe,
organic paint to protect so that I don't get anything boring in there,
I don't get any disease and I don't get any sun scald on those sensitive things
that we just pruned off.
So hopefully this was a helpful video as far as pruning an old tree. You know,
I could have been a lot more severe with this,
but as I'm relatively new to fruit trees compared to vegetables and fruits,
then I think I did a pretty good conservative job here.
And if there's anything that you saw that you think that I should be aware of,
or anyone else should be aware of,
remember the mission of Epic Gardening - teach 10 million people how to grow
their own food. Which means I can't do that by myself.
So if there's something that you want to add to the conversation,
put that down in the comments. Until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.