Winter Pruning Guide for Fruit Trees

Winter pruning of fruit trees is essential to ensure successful fruiting and plant health. If your fruit trees have gotten out of control or stopped fruiting then a winter maintenance prune can help bring them back to life.

The Garden Ninja helps renovate an old out of shape pear tree giving hints and tips for the tools and techniques needed when pruning a fruit tree.

All explained by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He's an RHS winning garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester's Saturday morning garden phone in.

Welcome back to garden ninja now it's February it's cold damp and a bit miserable but it's an ideal time to prune fruit trees so today's guide is going to be showing you how to successfully prune fruit trees now pruning them will give you a better chance of fruit it will give you a neater shape and hopefully prevent some diseases and illnesses that may affect your fruit trees if you don't prune them each year so come on let's get cracking!

So I've had a number of you that are written to me asking about old fruit trees or orchards that you've inherited in gardens that you've moved to now I have a small orchard here that I've inherited and it's in a bit of a bad way so I thought this would be a really good example of showing you how effective winter pruning is particularly of fruit trees an instance today I'm going to be pruning a pear tree and winter is the ideal time to do that you may notice some damsons and some plums and this is the wrong time for any of the Prunus family prune those in summer to reduce
the issue with silver leaf disease so don't prune those in the winter apples and pears you got to so you might be able to see a walk through the quagmire of mud time here it's quite an old established pear tree but it has a branch that's sort of reaching for the stars it's just gone bonkers I doubt it's ever really been formally pruned such a day I'm going to show you how you an prune a fruit tree such as a pear in winter just start to bring it back into a more open shape which will also allow for better fruiting and this one last year producing no fruits just loads of growth which is a really clear sign that you need to do some maintenance pruning to get it back under control and to give it the best start next year.

So before we get started I thought it might be worthwhile just running through the kinds of tools you may need when it comes to pruning fruit trees so the first off Secateurs keep them clean always sharpen them so a small pair sharp secateurs it's good for pruning small branches and just keeping a tree in general good health however if you're moving on to more severe pruning like we're about to do you may need a pair of telescopic loppers as I call them which have a really sharp blade you can go through quite quite sort of thick branches usually it tells you the kind
of diameter that you can cut through on them and different pairs of loppers will have different gauges they're good for the thicker branches however if you're going to be doing some big major pruning like me you may need one of these you can see that which is a specialist wood saw the trees so it's got a really vicious blade razorsharp very dangerous so make sure you've got adequate protection in the form of gloves if you're using a ladder make sure you've got some at the bottom to help and just take care slowly but surely wins the race so I'm going to take these
tools around now start to prune the pear tree.

So once you're ready to start pruning first tip would be stand back have a look at the shape of the tree and identify the key branches that you're
going to need to remove now key branches would be any dead material branches that are crossing rubbing or in my case a branch that's just been left to grow to tow another tip is always start at the top and work down don't be tempted especially on bigger trees just to cut halfway down to save all that work because what will happen is that all those branches will fall on top of you and do yourself a mischief so take some time if you're gonna use ladders make sure the proper secured little by little
bit bit bit start to take down the branches that you want in small chunks
so let's go!

so taking out the leader stem which should mean that all the energy that was going into those upper branches then gets redirected to all the side branches and will hopefully give me some fruit now I'm having to really hard prune this because it is a real mess so if it don't get fruit this year it's not a problem providing it get it into a good shape for the year after that it can fruit because at the moment with all these branches crossing over tangled.