Are You Getting the Pruning Results You Want?

Good question! Pruning apple acreage is one of the longest, toughest and most costly jobs in orcharding. As a horticulturist, I am always amazed at where all the growth comes from in orchards from year to year.

Pruning can last for 4-5 months in the dormant season and again for a few weeks during the summer months for some growers and managers. If done well, it will get you on the road to a successful crop. As one grower put it years ago when discussing pruning, "Don't try to manage any more acreage than you can effectively prune".

The cost of pruning can vary considerably with cultivar, tree maturity, planting density, training need and general level of neglect. Cutting corners on good pruning practices will not likely improve profit margins but it will however result in higher cullage rates and loss of fruit bud quality for the short-term.

Spending that extra one or two hundred dollars per acre does not necessarily guarantee a successful result. Some of the indicators of a job well done can be deceiving. Piles of brush don't really tell much other than looking for limb diameters in the brush pile and seeing what is being removed from the canopy. The only thing that really counts in the end is perhaps cullage rates due to size and colour and ultimately recoverable volumes of Fancy fruit per row or cubic foot of managed canopy.

One of the indicators that I like to use this time of year in any given situation is fruit bud distribution and fruit bud diameter. Healthy fruit buds are not produced in areas of the canopy where light is deficient, no matter how well the trees are watered or fed.

Trees that have had an adequate pruning job done during the dormant season respond with well-distributed spurs fed by clusters of large healthy spur leaves in the spring. This usually results in a higher probability for large well-sized fruit at the end of the growing season.

Most apple trees are started well with good intentions by the grower for tree shape and ultimate tree size. Somehow, those cuts that should be made early in the life of the tree often get missed. These are the large diameter tree-like branches that carry in many cases nice looking buds. You cannot afford to grow tree-like branches within a tree canopy in modern high-density plantings.

The greatest temptation by the average grower is to leave strong limbs in the upper canopy area. You can get away with this for a year or two on young trees. However, if the practice is adopted on an annual basis the best fruit on the tree begins to creep up and out of reach until the most economical part of the tree to manage has very few if any good fruit growing in it. The idea is to keep the tree profile from top to bottom equally productive and equally strong with adequate light distribution.

Most mature trees have one or two offending limbs in the upper middle canopy that prevent up to one third of the light the tree receives from getting to the lower canopy area. The growing season is so short that a few days can make a difference to the formation of fruit buds for the following year. The tree starts to decide very early in the growing season what it do will in the next year in any given part of the canopy.

Look for those offending limbs first when starting in on a tree and see what a difference their removal makes to the look and shape of a tree.