The Art And Science Of Pruning, Lesson 1

Step 1: The Art and Science of Pruning:

Lets assume that this is a semi-dwarf apple tree and you brought it home from the nursery two or three years ago. It is making good new growth all the way out here. But you want to take a good look at your main branches as they come off the trunk.

Step 2: Ensuring safety & strength.

To ensure the safety and the strength of this tree over time the angle at which the main branches come off the trunk is real important. We try to shoot for an angle of 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. You see these lower four branches are approximately those angles and they will be strong over time.

Step 3: Dangers of horizontal branches:

This branch though is coming out fairly horizontally. What will happen over time is as we grow our fruit out here, and if you’re in snow country and you have ice pulling that down in the winter, you have a lot of weight on that horizontal branch. And that can cause a serious break here and that could actually hurt the whole tree by opening up a wound in the trunk.

So what we want to do is remove this branch. We carefully make a saw cut here and we take a look at our other branches. This one is a good angle but this one is way too narrow. It’s more of an 11 o’clock angle so we want to remove this branch also.

Step 4: Thanks for watching.

The rest of these branches look pretty good. This one is a little horizontal but we might work on that and prune it to something coming up. We’ll look at that after we take these branches out.