hi welcome back to garden ninja today's video is all about summer pruning of
fruit trees and in particular I'm gonna be focusing in on apples and pears now a
few of you online on Twitter have asked me how do you prune fruit trees in summer
especially new trees so behind me I've got a number of fruit trees that are
about two years old they're going to show you today exactly what you need to
do to get more fruits to get less disease and damage and make sure that
you enjoy your fruit trees as much as you possibly can so come on let's get
pruning! Now there's a few key benefits of pruning your fruit trees in summer so
that you end up with loads of delicious fruits and the first is that you want to
open up the fruit tree so that you get the maximum light and air around your
potential fruits tends to happen in summer is that the fruit tree such as an
apple put on loads more leafy growth and sometimes your fruits can get
overshadowed they don't grow as large or as sweet and you don't get as good a
harvest so the first thing to do is to take away some of the crowding out of
that fruit tree to make sure that the fruits are there get maximum sunlight so
you get the most bang your buck!
To prune your fruit trees you're going to need a really sharp clean pair of
secateurs and the cleaner and sharper the better because what that means is
that it reduces damaged when you're cutting through the different stems and
parts of the fruit tree if you've got an old pair in the garage that a bit worse
for wear spend five minutes in the kitchen with a metal scourer and clean
them up as best you can even better is to get a sharpening block and to make
sure that the razor-sharp so if you look after you tools your tools or look after
you. I'm going to be using this pair of Niwaki secateurs here on my fruit tree
pruning. Now if your apple tree is looking a bit like this where you've got
loads of fruit the branches are getting really thick and heavy it's a good time
towards the end of summer to start pruning off some of this growth to let
the light down to the fruit if you don't do that you'll end up with smaller
fruits and maybe less of a yield so again you can be quite bold and brave
and in this example this one here can come off snip we've got all this leafy
growth it's don't want that take that back here as you can see we're
getting my light to the fruit less weight should help these branches
support themselves and you get a better yield.
Now during the summer months you may have noticed some of your fruit trees
like this plum behind me but on loads and loads of new growths and their stems
flying out everywhere loads of green shoots you may think well I'm gonna
get loads of fruit the chances are that it's put all that energy into those new
shoots and it won't be putting it into spurs that actually make the
fruit so in the summer what we want to do in particular with the plum tree which you
can only prune in the summer you want to take back some of the leafy grow so
that you're forcing the tree to put its energy into creating buds and fruits
because that survival mechanism is gonna kick in if you left it like this the
trees going to get bigger and bigger the chances of getting food probably gonna
get smaller and smaller because it's quite contempt to put on leafy
growth where you want to give it a little bit of a shock and a bit of a
nudge and say come on give me some plums! I'm just gonna work my way around the
tree standing back taking bits off standing back again there's no race it's
not a sprint it's a marathon you're trying to give it form us an open
goblet shape and make sure they're taking back some of this growth so that
you get those buds this one here it's probably the leader but it's way too
tall so I'm gonna take my path there's a bud just there there we go then.
Okay so you can see that I've taken down probably third if not a bit more now
it may look brutal I can't guarantee you that you'll end up with better juicier
plums or fruits if you do this in the summer!
Well you saw me passing my hands through I was checking that there's no crossing
branches and a good tip is that you can push your hand through then you prune it
correctly you keep smashing into things then you probably need to take a few
more out as I said take your time stand back be bold be brave and if it
all goes a bit pear-shaped you can always recover it next year.
With this example we've got the open goblet shape here and all of space but
once again all this foliage is kind of reaching for the stars we need to pull
that back down to ensure that we get plenty fruit next year so I'm just going
to be taking off up to 1/2 third in some cases just to neaten things up anything
that's looking a bit too long now if these two branches you can see that
they're about to start crossing and probably loving each other so I need to
select the strongest of the two which is this top one because you can see it's
got all these little buds in there ready which will then fruits next year so this
one it's just the leggy growth there's nothing on there so I'm gonna snip but
right there back and take that one off.
Again this one heres rubbing up and pushing through these branches so needs
to remove up all this space now here
and there you have it my easy guys summer pruning the fruit trees just
apples and pears if you've liked this video why not
subscribe to my youtube channel whatever loads more garden design hints
tips and hacks for now I'm gonna take these inside and make an apple pie! I've
been Garden Ninja. Happy Gardening. Come on Barry!