Hi, my name is Ben Scow.
I work for Utah State University Extension down in Washington County,
so the southern corner of the state
and we're going to be going over pruning today.
Today we're at the end of January, so in southern Utah we're
a little bit warmer than northern Utah.
But we'll start pruning usually in January, the first part.
Northern Utah's usually a little bit later,
they'll start pruning, usually February, March.
And the goal is to prune
before everything starts to break, bud,
and we start having blossoms.
We want to be done pruning by that point.
But we're here in Hurricane.
We're at my family orchard, so we have primarily peach trees,
so we have quite a few peaches.
If you look behind me, we've been pruning quite a bit.
We started a little bit early.
We started in December because we had so many trees,
we usually don't get done unless we start earlier.
We've already pruned this orchard so you can see kind of the end result
and you can see how much wood we're taking off.
This is a lot of fruiting wood so you can see the color difference.
So this is really kind of a maroon color, kind of purplish.
That's all the fruiting wood that we're taking a lot
of it off we're leaving a lot.
But we're trying to reduce the
fruit load a little bit just so we can manage a bit better.
And that's pruning.
And primarily for this video, we're going to be going over
peaches, and you can apply this to apricots and plums as well.
Cherries are kind of their own animal.
So we're going to stay away from cherries.
Apples and pears are also different.
But this style of pruning works really well for peaches and apricots.
Okay so when we're pruning
peach trees, there's four things that you need to keep in mind.
So the first one is we are pruning for
height and height adjustment.
One of the questions we often get at the office is, "Can I just
let my fruit tree grow or my peach tree go
and not prune it from year to year?"
The problem you get
is they will get really tall.
It depends a little bit on what rootstock they're on.
If it's a dwarf, semi-dwarf, or a standard
rootstock or on their own rootstock, will restrict their growth a little bit.
But really when we're pruning
we're managing how high they're going to get.
So all of these trees are on a semi-dwarf rootingstock
which is the most common and they grow really well
and they're pretty good size.
But we're trying to keep them from getting their full height.
They'll get about 25 feet tall.
And if you can imagine being on a 10 foot ladder,
trying to pick that fruit is really not practical.
So the number one thing we're looking at
with pruning is to restrict the height.
The second thing we're doing is we are thinning out
some of the fruiting wood.
So, when we first started, you could see all that fruiting wood that we had
cut off, they produce a lot of fruit wood. A good, healthy peach tree
will produce a tremendous amount.
So we're trying to reduce that,
so our workload is going to be less later in the year
when we start thinning the trees to get some of
that fruit off. So we'll have good high quality fruit
and better tasting fruit.
So that's the second one is we're just trying to thin out some
of the fruiting wood.
And then the third one
is one of the most important things
with stone fruit, is most of them like to have an open center.
They depend quite a bit on sunlight to be able to ripen uniformly.
To also produce fruiting wood for next year,
the sunlight into the middle is
really critical and crucial for that.
So we're going to be pruning out the middles.
The fourth thing to keep in mind, and this is if you have a
newer tree, if it's 1 to 4 years old,
we're going to be structuring it really heavily.
Those first three years and the fourth year a little
bit as well.
What we're shooting for
with peaches and going with an open center.
A lot of old timers will call this the open base
style of pruning, but it's an
open center pruning where we're having
4, 4 to 5.
Well, 3 to 5, really, you can get away with 3
and 5 is a little bit heavy, but in the
backyard setting, 5 is okay.
And this one has probably one too many.
But we have 4 main,
these are called scaffolding branches. This is where everything's
going to kind of branch off. You can tell it starts really low.
This is what helps
keep our fruit trees low in the first place, too.
They don't start up here and start branching out,
Otherwise this tree would be another 4 to 5 feet taller.
They start branching lower.
We select for the best ones.
We try to space them out as evenly as we can
to get that spacing.
So they're going in four different
directions somewhat evenly.
And that's what we're looking for when we're shaping them.
That has to be done in the first couple of years.
Once they get to be a
lot older, you're taking out really large
pieces of wood to try and accomplish that.
It can be pretty detrimental to the tree.
So the first 4 years we're going to be looking at that one.
But again, we're looking at the height,
we're looking at opening the centers,
thinning out the fruit web,
then the first four years, we're trying to get that structure
and that shape in.
So this tree,
where I like to start, I like to start with
opening up the center first.
When you have an open center tree, the peaches,
the trees,
if they had a brain, they're really opportunistic.
They can tell that they have
they have a space that sunlight is getting through
and it's not doing them good unless they can put a leaf there.
So they're always going to fill up the centers every year.
So the first thing to do is we're going to cut out water sprouts,
and those are these branches that are growing almost
straight up. They grow up right up into the middle.
They have to come out.
So I always start with what has to come out first.
And then we'll do the other steps as we go.
So these ones have to come out, we're going to prune those.
When you're pruning,
there's a couple of pieces of equipment that you need as well.
The first one is the set of pruners.
I have electric ones.
The brand of these is Infaco, and we have so many trees that
it makes it a lot easier than trying to use your
loppers, the loppers work.
You'll want something that has a, their called bypass sheers.
So you want something that's going to pass the cutting end.
So when it goes down, it makes a clean cut all the way
through. Versus they have some that are like an anvil type
shear where they press against,
they have a bar on the bottom
that the blade hits against directly and it kind of squishes things.
These work the best.
They make the cleanest cut and the tree hill's better.
The second thing is, you're gonna need some kind of a saw.
It can be a handsaw.
We have just an electric chainsaw.
You can have an actual
gas powered chainsaw.
A sawzall works just fine.
Whatever you have to cut, maybe
some larger branches out.
And once they get to be about two inches in diameter, it's really hard to
put enough pressure on your shears
to cut those. And that can also damage the blades.
So having the saw is really handy.
Also a ladder.
If you have a taller tree or an older tree that you can't get any
lower, a ladder is is usually required.
My trees
we've kept them low enough that I can reach everything by hand
just so we're staying away from ladders
a little bit, but you may need a ladder as well.
Those are really the three things you need to prune.
So we're going to go ahead and we'll
start pruning out the middles.
And just as a kind of a cleanliness thing.
I always throw the limbs out. That way
I don't leave anything in here that I get confused
as I'm pruning.
Just to make sure that I'm
not leaving anything in there that I might mix up when I'm cutting later.
That's already been cut.
They just keep everything kind of clean, throw it out as you're cutting.
We're going to get rid of all the water sprouts.
Okay, so we've gotten rid of most of the water sprouts.
The other thing to do is there's
still a lot of little branches growing up in the middle.
So we're just going to go ahead and clear all those little branches out.
All right. So we've got the middles cleaned out.
The next thing we're going to work on is
the height just to make sure that everything's at the right height.
We're not going too high.
For a commercial operation we're trying to
keep them low enough that we don't have to have ladders
at all and we try and avoid them.
So everything I can usually reach, anything above that
we try and prune off.
Also,
when you make a lot of these cuts,
it's important not to leave a little stub sticking out.
We try and go back to a good main branch.
Then you'll cut right above that and leave
maybe a quarter of an
inch as you cut.
So just for the height.
It's pretty good on the height.
So we've gone around, taken everything off.
So it's at a manageable height.
Then again, the third thing that we're keeping in mind
as we thin things out so we can get rid of some
of the fruiting wood.
And it also allows
the fruit as it matures that it'll have enough room to grow.
So looking at these branches, there's a lot going on with them.
So at this part
we're trying to select
good fruiting ones.
So this is what fruiting wood looks like.
It's kind of that purplish red color.
You're also looking at the buds, so fruiting wood
and where the fruit's going to be have kind of unique little buds there.
They come on in clusters, it looks like a cluster of two.
And there's actually three buds.
The third one's hard to see.
But the two cluster, the two big buds will turn into a blossom.
There's one right in the middle that will be a leaf.
So looking for those, you can tell this fruit, this piece of
fruiting wood would have had peaches all along it.
So as you're pruning, you can tell where the fruit's
going to come on and where
it's going to be. The best fruiting wood is about the diameter of a pencil
or larger.
So we're trying to select for that.
So we'll go in on these branches we've left.
We're going to try and thin it out so there's enough room
between the branches
that the fruit
is going to have enough room that come on
and grow.
Okay, so this branch is pretty good.
We're trying to leave the biggest and best fruiting wood
that's on there. So we're selecting for that.
And as we go around and just look at it, a lot of them have a lot going on.
You can't stick your hands through because there's so much
happening.
So we'll start thinning out anything that's going to be
crossing over one another.
And opening
it up,
Man, I'll just go around, do one more pass to make sure everything looks
the way I would like it.
Again,
once you've gone through it once or once you've done one pass and you go
back, it's really easy to tell if you have areas that are really heavy.
So I can tell this branch is heavier than the rest of the branches on the tree.
I've got to send it out just a little bit more.
Okay, I talked about before, too,
how you don't want to leave stubs, so this is what would be considered a stub.
It's about three inches tall.
There's nothing that's going to be growing on that.
So we're going to cut it off.
So with whatever
saw you would have, you can use that to make it a bit
cleaner.
All right,
so this is what the tree's going to look like when it's done and pruned.
We have accomplished those four things.
Three, really, unless you have a young tree.
But we have,
we've brought it down so it's more manageable.
Everything for me is within arm's reach.
If you have a larger tree, as long as
you're keeping it as short as you can, that way you can reach the fruit.
We've opened up
the center that allows the sunlight to go through and throughout the tree,
and allow for more uniform ripening.
We've gone through and we've thinned out the really heavy branches.
A way to tell if you're not thinning out your branches well enough,
is if in the spring and in past years,
if you're having to go out with 2
by 4's or anything to prop up your peach trees,
one, you're not thinning too
much, but you're also probably leaving too much fruit wood on.
A good, healthy tree, one that's producing good quality fruit
should never have to have boards
underneath it to prop it up.
And that goes back to how you prune them.
So you can tell that this can
support a tremendous amount of weight.
And then when you thin it, it does help
reduce your fruit load. And you make up
what you're throwing on the ground, so many people
have such a hard time throwing fruit on
the ground when it gets to thining season.
But you make up the volume that you're
throwing on the ground
in quantity of size on your peaches.
Pruning definitely helps with that.
It's not nearly as overwhelming to throw so
much fruit on the ground because you have so much fruit wood on your peach tree,
it's producing fruit.
By reducing that, you have a fewer amount
that you're able to thin.
It also allows the same thing:
light penetration to get into the tree a lot better to help that fruit ripen.
Helps with the air flow so you don't have disease problems.
So that's why we're thinning out the
fruiting wood so much. That's what it looks like when we're all done.
It doesn't take too long. Once you get the hang of it, you can do this with
just your regular loppers.
You can use a small pair of snips to get some of the smaller stuff
if you want, and then having a saw to make some of those bigger cuts.
So you can make your tree
a healthy and manageable size.