By Heather Bryant, Regional Field Specialist, Food and Agriculture
The best time to prune tree fruit and small fruit (berries) is late winter to early spring while the plants are dormant. In this area, that generally means February to April. Therefore, now is the perfect time to start planning.
It really is best to plan to do some pruning every year. If you’ve ever bought a piece of property with a 40 year old apple tree that hasn’t been pruned in 10 years you know why. The branches get much too large and pruning becomes a challenge. Worse, in some cases you can’t accomplish all that needs to be done in one year without damaging the tree, and you need to come up with a multi-year strategy for bringing the tree back. Additionally, left to their own devices all fruit will tend to produce too much vegetative growth, proper pruning will actually lead to better fruit production and fewer insect and disease problems.
The first question to ask yourself is “do I have the right tools”, or in my case “do I remember where I stored them after last season”. For small fruit pruning jobs long handled loppers (for branches up to 2” diameter) and hand pruners (for branches up to ¾” diameter) should be all you need. Personally, I prefer curved blades because they fit around the branch better, but you may need to test out a couple styles of pruning tools before you find what you like best. If you have a lot of plants to prune every year you may want to invest in loppers whose blades can be removed and replaced if they chip or get worn out. For tree fruit, you will likely need to add a pruning saw. Folding saws are nice because they are safer to transport, but they may not work on larger branches. Some people use hack saws with replaceable blades.
Next, if you are new to pruning or fear your skills are rusty, the web is full of resources. Cooperative Extension has two factsheets that may help. One for pruning mature trees http://extension.unh.edu/resources/files/Resource000582_Rep604.pdf and another for young trees https://extension.unh.edu/resources/files/Resource000588_Rep610.pdf. The University of Maine Cooperative Extension has a couple of great videos for pruning blueberries and apples http://umaine.edu/highmoor/videos/.
The details of pruning strategy vary from species to species, but the common themes are maintaining good air flow thru the plant to minimize disease problems, and cutting off anything that is dead, likely to break off in a storm, or that will interfere with mowing.
Finally, if you’d like something more interactive than a factsheet or video, we run a series of fruit pruning demonstrations across the state each spring. For more information on demonstrations near you please visit our website (http://tinyurl.com/nmw4ul2).
Source:unh.edu