Pruning Fruit Trees with @papa-pepper

beatitudes8(55)

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A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity and pleasure to have @papa-pepper, @momma-pepper, @little-peppers @dwells, @essentialoilmom, @beardo, @jeejee and their families down for a visit.
While they were here @papa-pepper and I decided to prune my orchard. It needed its yearly pruning and it hadn't been done yet.
We pruned twenty-two fruit trees in all. Pears, Apples, cherry, plum, apricot, nectarine, almond, peach, persimmon and several nut trees. They are all young trees just three seasons old. Pruning is extremely important for the health and vigor of your trees. You can actually damage and or set back your trees fruit production by not pruning them.

Here is

@papa-pepper saving some pruning s for replanting

Pruning also helps to stimulate growth for the next season.
Lets talk about how to prune your fruit trees.
First, how do you make the cuts? What angle do you make the cuts and where? I've posted a nice guide below to help with those questions.

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Secondly what type of pruning? There are two main ways to prune fruit trees. You can prune "open center" or Vase or central leader. It mainly depends on what kind of tree and how it naturally grows for the best fruit production.

A Vase or open center looks like this. The trees that you want to prune open center are apricots, nectarines, peaches, sour cherries, and Japanese plums prefer an open center/vase shape.

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The other type of pruning is central leader or main leader pruning. Trees like apples, sweet cherries, pears, and European plums benefit from a central leader pruning structure. Here is a good guide to get the feel for what a central leader pruning looks like.

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We were able to get a ton of cuttings from all the trees and I'm going to try and get them to "root" so we can plant them as "new"trees this spring. Here is a picture of some of the cuttings.