welcome back to garden ninja now it's February it's cold damp and a bit
miserable but it's an ideal time to prune fruit trees
so today's guide is going to be showing you how to successfully prune fruit
trees now pruning them will give you a better chance of fruit it will give you
a neater shape and hopefully prevent some diseases and illnesses that may
affect your fruit trees if you don't prune them each year so
come on let's get cracking!
So I've had a number of you that are written to me asking about old fruit
trees or orchards that you've inherited in gardens that you've moved to now I
have a small orchard here that I've inherited and it's in a bit of a bad way
so I thought this would be a really good example of showing you how effective
winter pruning is particularly of fruit trees an instance today I'm going to be
pruning a pear tree and winter is the ideal time to do that you may notice
some damsons and some plums and this is the wrong time for any of the Prunus
family prune those in summer to reduce the issue with silver leaf disease so
don't prune those in the winter apples and pears you got to so you might be
able to see a walk through the quagmire of mud time here it's quite an old
established pear tree but it has a branch that's sort of reaching for the
stars it's just gone bonkers I doubt it's ever really been formally pruned
such a day I'm going to show you how you can prune a fruit tree such as a pear in
winter just start to bring it back into a more open shape which will also allow
for better fruiting and this one last year producing no fruits just loads of growth
which is a really clear sign that you need to do some maintenance pruning to
get it back under control and to give it the best start next year
so before we get started I thought it might be worthwhile just running through
the kinds of tools you may need when it comes to pruning fruit trees so the
first off Secateurs keep them clean always sharpen them so a small pair sharp
secateurs it's good for pruning small branches and just keeping a tree in
general good health however if you're moving on to more severe pruning like
we're about to do you may need a pair of telescopic loppers as I call them which
have a really sharp blade you can go through quite quite sort of thick
branches usually it tells you the kind of diameter that you can cut through on
them and different pairs of loppers will have different gauges they're good for
the thicker branches however if you're going to be doing some big major pruning
like me you may need one of these you can see that which is a specialist wood
saw the trees so it's got a really vicious blade
razorsharp very dangerous so make sure you've got adequate protection in the
form of gloves if you're using a ladder make sure you've got some at the bottom
to help and just take care slowly but surely
wins the race so I'm going to take these tools around now start to prune the
pear tree so once you're ready to start pruning first tip would be stand back
have a look at the shape of the tree and identify the key branches that you're
going to need to remove now key branches would be any dead material branches that
are crossing rubbing or in my case a branch that's just been left to grow to
tow another tip is always start at the top and work down don't be tempted
especially on bigger trees just to cut halfway down to save all that work
because what will happen is that all those branches will fall on top of you
and do yourself a mischief so take some time if you're gonna use ladders make
sure the proper secured little by little bit bit bit start to take down the
branches that you want in small chunks so let's go
so taking out the leader stem which should mean that all the energy that was
going into those upper branches then gets redirected to all the side branches
and will hopefully give me some fruit now I'm having to really hard prune
this because it is a real mess so if it don't get fruit this year it's not a problem
providing it get it into a good shape for the year after that it can fruit
because at the moment with all these branches crossing over tangle together
all the energy is just going green growth nothing's going to green growth so
I'm going to do now is with a pair of secateurs is just very lightly take out
any crossing stands but I don't want to go to too crazy because I've already
taking a big chunk off so sort of every two to three crossing stands are
relieved this year and then next year I'll finish the rest off
so here's a great example of a set of messy branches that needle of proof so
in this example I would take out this stem here because it's really getting in
the way it's rubbing against this one and when they're all aiming in the same
direction so I would take that back to here on this one which would free that
branch up would remove that one that way and as you can see then the rest of the
branches have enough room to bear fruit when you are cutting back a branch
though the good rule of thumb and this probably isn't the best example you want
to take it back to just before a new bud because the fruits will grow on
last year's growth with a pear or an apple so if I was to trim this one back
I would take it to their wall a bear with a clean pair of secateurs at an
angle but if you need more help on pruning I've got a video just on that so
I'm not going to go into too much detail but just before a bud which will then
hopefully give you some fruit next year yeah all these crossing stems really
need to come out and that's what I'm gonna work on that and a really good tip
that I was given by a northern chap that was really good at pruning said that
once you finish pruning a fruit tree you should be able to throw a flat cap
through the center and it shouldn't get stuck and that really is a metaphor
for the open goblet shape if you're going to be pruning a tree like this so
the next couple years I'm going to aim to get a flat cap, throw it through and prove him right so finish
pruning the pear tree now on the cuttings that have taken off here on the
ground now they are mixed in with a few other apple tree pruning and other bits
and bobs as you can see there's quite a lot here and I've probably taken off the
pear tree in the background you can see over there probably about fifth which is
quite a lot to considerable amount so as I said it may not fruit this year but
it's gonna look a damn sight better than it did so I'm gonna clean up all these
cuttings you know dry some of them for kindling for the log burner that ran
recycle as much as possible so if you liked this video why not subscribe to my
youtube channel there are loads more garden design and maintenance how-to
it's from me - Garden Ninja happy gardening!