This Technique of Pruning Trees Will Change Your Life

What's going on growers? It's James Frisione coming to you live from Jersey. Today me and Tucker are going to share with you the five techniques for pruning that will change your life. Let's go! Our main goal when pruning is to increase the sunlight distribution to the tree. More light means higher production and higher quality fruit. So to start out let's jump into the proper techniques necessary to open up our trees to more light. When it comes to pruning there are really only two kinds of cuts, thinning cuts and heading cuts. And this leads us to our first technique, the thinning cut. I'd say about 90% of the cuts that you're going to make are going to be thinning cuts. So what a thinning cut is is when you remove an entire branch, shoot or limb. So for instance let me show you what a thinning cut is right here. When we're going to cut this branch off right here we want to remove it. This is going to be a thinning cut right here because we're removing this whole entire branch. Let me give you another example right over here. So right down here I want to remove this branch because this branch is crossing over the top of it. So I'm going to make what's called a thinning cut. So we'll do that right here. This is a thinning cut where I'm removing the whole branch and just leaving a little bit of the collar so that can heal over. We don't want to leave too much that there's a bud and it has some growth shoots that come right out of it. So thinning cuts like the name implies are made to thin out the tree. Again this is going to be most of your cuts. Let's make another thinning cut right here. So this is a thinning cut and what the cut does is really important. What it makes the tree actually do. So when we make a thinning cut there's not a lot of regrowth that happens at the point of the cut but the growth is actually sent out in the alternative patterns. So you're going to get more growth in these branches over here in the branch at the top here as opposed to what's known as a heading cut. That's going to be our second technique that I'm going to get into now and understanding what a thinning cut is is going to be a lot easier when I show you what a heading cut is also. Our second technique is the heading cut. Let me bring you to a branch and give you an example of that. So if we were to make a thinning cut we would cut this shoot right here where it meets the branch and remove this whole shoot. But for a heading cut what we do is we just cut the branch to remove the terminal bud. The terminal bud is this bud at the top here. So if we were to make this a heading cut right here right in the center that right there would be a heading cut. What this does is it increases a lot of the lateral branching, it increases a lot of the upward growth, and it also changes the way that tree is going to essentially react because this terminal bud is kind of what sends the information down to the branch and lets it know what to do. So this is really mainly for when you're first starting out your young trees but you can do it for some of your older trees also because what this is going to do is increase a lot of this lateral growth which is going to, you know, block some more of the light. That's why it's not a thinning cut. That's why it's a heading cut. So for me to do a heading cut right there wouldn't make a lot of sense. What I would rather do because this shoot goes straight up would be a thinning cut just like this. So let me bring you over to another example of a thinning and a heading cut over here. So let's find a good spot where we want to make a heading cut. So I'll remove this branch here because it's lower than the other one. So if I was to do a heading cut what I would do is I would cut the branch right here. This removes the terminal bud. This changes the way the branch is going to grow. This is necessary to also stiffen up your branches if they're thin and again it will increase a lot of the lateral growth here but it will also, it could reduce some of the amount of spurs on a tree like an apple tree like this. So I don't want to make a thinning cut, a heading cut right there. I want to make a thinning cut. So an example of when we want to use something like a heading cut on a tree like this that's already fruiting would be say a branch over here. This branch is getting, is getting a lot longer than some of the other branches and it's starting to cross over the side branches here. So I would make a heading cut and it's best to do it on wood that's not, that's not one years old, a little older than one year old wood. So you can see right here where this collar is. That's where last year's growth started and all this is one year old wood right here. So what I'm going to do is just cut right below that. I'm going to remove this. This is going to be a heading cut. What this is going to do is it's going to increase all this side branching down here. Now let's move over to a young apple tree and I'll show you the different kinds of cuts that we're going to use on it. So as we know there's basically only two kinds of cuts, the thinning cut and the heading cut. I can see this apple tree right here. First thing I want to do is remove some of these upward uh water shoots. So right here I'm going to use a thinning cut. I'm going to remove this whole shoot right where it meets the branch. Over here I want to remove this. I'm going to use another thinning cut to remove this where it meets the branch. Just like that. Again you want to leave a little bit so it could heal over. Now right here you'll see with my young apple tree I've got four main branches or scaffold branches going out in all different directions. This is what you want to see. One thing you'll notice about these branches though if you'll if you take a peek is that this one is much longer than the other ones. So to balance that out a bit you'll notice it's long and it's thin. So to balance this out but to also stiffen the branch I'm going to make a heading cut. So when we make a heading cut on a young branch like this we don't want to cut more than a quarter of the branch off. If we cut more than a quarter of the branch off then it's going to a lot of vigorous growth is going to come out of it and it's not going to focus as much on you know creating some spurs in the future. So we only want to head this back just a little bit. Heading your branches back lightly won't be won't make as big as like a huge growth spurt reaction from some of the some of the buds. So we're going to cut this to an outward bud right here to try to make it about the same length as the other ones. When we do that it's going to basically send information to the these three buds below it to start growing in out in different directions and to put a lot of the growth there because again we remove that terminal bud. Whenever you remove the terminal bud on a branch that terminal bud is what holds essentially the information of what the branch should do. So when you have a terminal bud on a branch like this it kind of suppresses the lateral growth because it knows it's got that terminal bud. When you remove that terminal bud it tells the tree you know we've got to we've got to find a new head bud to kind of lead. So these side buds which are like suppressed because of the inhibitor within the information in that in that terminal bud it kind of releases the suppression and the inhibiting inhibiting so that these side branches can grow out. So that was a heading cut there the other ones were thinning cuts. I noticed right here these branches are too close together so what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this one with a thinning cut right here. Before I move on to the third technique I just want to talk about one more cut it's like it's almost like a version of both those two cuts combined. It's known as a selective heading cut sometimes called a bench cut. So let me show you what that is. So here's a branch right here. If we were to cut this off right here that would be a thinning cut. If we were to cut the cut this branch right here that would be a heading cut. But we're going to do something known as a selective heading cut where we're going to cut back this branch to a lateral branch. So I'm going to take this I'm going to cut it back to a lateral branch just like this. What that does is it sends makes this one now that main branch and it's different than a regular heading cut because if I was to just cut it right here then if I also just cut it right there then all that you get a lot of vigorous growth coming out of right here. When you do a bench cut you get much less vigorous growth and you're not really you're not changing the shape of the tree you're just kind of shortening it and making it so it's not as so as big or long. So these cuts are again it's a selective heading cut it's kind of like almost combining both cuts together. So those are really the only cuts you're going to need when pruning. Every cut you make is going to be a version of a thinning cut or a heading cut. You're not going to do a lot of bench cuts and you don't want to do a lot of bench cuts on trees when they're much older. This is for like when you're just getting kind of your tree started. So much of like growing trees properly and having good fruit trees is establishing the shape when they're younger. That's when you want to use your heading cuts then as because the heading cuts create more growth and kind of block some of the light to but your thinning cuts are just like the name implies they thin the tree out and open it up to light. So as your trees get older you're mostly just going to be using thinning cuts so more light can get in and it's not going to take away from uh it's not going to like cause excessive growth that doesn't have any spurs on it if you're growing apples. So again most of your cuts are going to be thinning. Now let me bring you over to a tree where I made a bench cut the previous year and I want to explain what these cuts do because once you understand what a cut is and what it does it'll help you kind of take a peek into the future so you'll know what kind of cut you need for what particular circumstance. So let's think of last year. So last year I had this tree was growing just like this. These branches were a lot smaller they were not the dominant there was a dominant branch here. What I did was I made a a bench cut right here what that did was it made the three buds these three buds close to it really grow out so you got a lot a lot of lateral growth here but you got some upright growth from this one here so you could see what the bench cut actually did. Above here I made another bench cut that too that's a bench cut right there where it was going straight up I cut that off and I put it over to a to a lateral branch right here. So that's what your bench cuts are going to do. They're going to not going to again change the shape as much of the tree they're not going to have a lot of water shoots but they're just going to be able to help you shorten and lengthen it. Bench cuts are what you're going to do at the top of a tree if you want to shorten it too. So if I wanted to shorten this tree I want to just cut the tree right up top here because if I cut say right here these three lower buds you'd get a lot of branching. That's only what I would do if I want the tree to get taller. If I want to keep the tree smaller what I would do is I would make a bench cut right here and allow this to be the new top or I would actually better to make a bench cut right here and make this be the new top. That would shorten the length of the tree without getting too much excessive vigorous like shoot growth coming from here. The third technique to pruning is actually about training because if possible it's better to train a limb to the right branch angle than to actually remove one. So come in here and let me talk about one thing. So when it comes to apple trees and pear trees and stuff and a number of other trees the angle of the will determine what it produces. For instance if we have a branch that's growing upright just like this one then this is going to focus mainly on vegetative growth. If we have a branch that's completely lateral something like this this branch is going to focus mainly only on fruit and not much leaf growth. What we want is a branch angle from the center of the tree to be 60 degrees on average. Depending on your variety anywhere between 50 and 75 degrees is what is going to be best but a 60 degree branch angle is a good place to start. So we want 60 degree branch angles for the good combination of both vegetative and fruit growth. This will give us the best balance. We don't want branch angles that are really sharp because not only will they focus mainly on vegetative growth but they will also be much weaker. Trees with wider branch angles are much stronger and can hold more fruit. So what we do is we want to try to establish the but if you have a tree that's a little older like this what you could do is train it with a few different techniques. This is right here are just you know little things that I made just from a palette just spreaders essentially branch spreaders. I just cut up a palette made it like this just so I can make a bunch of them all different sizes and put it in the trees where I need. So what I would do is I take this tree like this this branch angle it down to about where I want it and then I'll put this right there to help give me that branch angle. Older branches are much harder to spread but now it's got that more of that 60 degree branch angle from the main stem as opposed to having that sharp branch angle. This is really going to make the tree a lot stronger. This technique of training right here is known as spreading because I'm spreading the branches apart. Let me bring you over to another tree and show you the other techniques. Before I do that though you'll notice right here look at this this was a bench cut that I made last year. Look what happened we've got some of that upright growth where it had a really vigorous shoot and then it put more growth in these side branches that's what we were looking for. So now let's move over to a to a different tree let me show you a different style of a of training. So another style of training besides spreading is weighting. So using a weight and bringing the branch down something like this or you could tie the branch that's what I'm going to do here. I just want to show you something real quick I'm just going to take this brick tie it around here you can use a brick or a stake probably would work even better cut this to length right there now we're going to bring it up and when tying down our branches this is the important part we don't want it going flat down like this we don't want the branch bent down like this what we want is a nice swoop and then the end of it coming up a little bit so we want to tie it about like right here we tie it here this is just temporary just to give you guys an idea you can use twine or or something a little thicker if you don't want to cut into the branches but this will work fine and then I'm just gonna move my brick a bit more to get the angle so I want it like swooping down and then coming up just like this so if you're going to tie your branches you want it like this you don't want it pointed straight down like that and you don't want to go in too much like this so maybe just a bit more out that looks beautiful just like that again training is important because the more we take away from the tree we don't want to we only want to prune what's necessary essentially we don't want to cut anything out that we need the more pruning especially for older trees hard pruning then that's going to just cause a lot of regrowth when we're getting trees that are producing we don't want a lot of regrowth that's why we want to focus on those thinning cuts just like pruning best time to train your trees is when they're young that's why it's important to make sure trees have good structure when they're young it's going to make for less pruning and just more fruiting and just an overall easier growing process so to train the trees when they're young a good thing to use is just little clothesline clips like this so what I'll do is I'll take this close I want to basically get a better angle on this branch bring it down a little bit I don't want it to be such a tight branch angle for this one right here I'm just going to have but for this here what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this right on down there and just rest that there like that that's going to give me that better branch angle you can see how how much like easier these bend when they're younger these branches and just using a little clothespin like that that works perfect so again training is super important when your trees are young looks like the boss has been out here with us it's a chilly day but he's still watching he's protecting us yeah he's pretty proud of his own merch this guy's a beast so we love him out here we hope you guys enjoy the big boss out here too I wanted to mention though we dropped the tuck merch so if you want to be a part of team grow if you want to support tuck and the whole channel grab one now at jamespergione.com the fourth technique for pruning actually has to do with shaping your tree so our main goal is to prune the tree in the shape that's going to be most productive for the kind of tree so for instance apples and pears they grow best with a central leader form this is what creates the most spurs this is where our fruit is going to be so right here is an apple tree growing to a central leader so central leader you'll notice there's one main stem following up the whole tree and then what's known as our scaffold branches come off the side of that that's a central leader it's also known as like a pyramid shape or a cone shape this is what uh you know can distribute the light best evenly throughout the tree so like the christmas trees same concept where our longest branches are going to be on the lowest and then as the tree ascends up like a pyramid or a triangle the branches are going to get shorter that's what grows best for an apple or a pear tree as opposed to the peach trees let me bring you over to that and show you the form and shape that they grow best in here's a peach tree right here and you'll notice it's not growing to a central leader this is going to what's known as an open center so peach trees they'll produce so much fruit on them that we're not worried about like getting more fruit spurs they produce fruit on one-year-old wood and there's going to be so much fruit on it that uh what we're really focused on with peach trees and plums is to keep an open center to get as much air and air moving through this whole system that's really important with peach trees so i'm just going to remove some of this lower wood just to give you a better example of what open center looks like and while i'm doing that i'm not going to actually use something like a loper to cut this out instead i'm going to use my saw right here so a saw is what we want to use for decent sized branches we don't want to use lopers unless they are bypass pruners so bypass meaning that the blade bypasses another blade and cuts through it like that what we don't want is the loper where it's just flat and then the blade pushes into it because when you start using lopers like that on trees what that's going to do is it's going to like press and squeeze the tissue with it where you're cutting it and that can cause damage to it so if you're going to make a cut like that see how it it causes some damage those are just aren't sharp enough you either want to use really sharp pruners that can cut through it easily to make a clean cut that doesn't press into the wood that doesn't compress the wood or we want to use a saw like this and bring it right down just like that so we don't want to be compressing our wood so let's move remove a couple of these everything that's growing in the inside because i want to open it up to the light like that this one's growing this one's growing again to the center of the tree so we're going to remove that like that so the open center of the tree i heard someone say yeah you should be able to throw a cat through the center sounds pretty funny but we need this open shape sometimes called a vase shape to get the most light so anything growing towards the center i'm going to removing this too if you step back it's almost like it's almost like a vase where where it's open in the center and then cascades out like this in all directions so this open center and vase shape is important for growing your peach and your plum trees so that's why knowing what kind of tree you're growing and knowing what what shape is the best for production is really important when growing your fruit trees knowing this when they're young and establishing that shape when they're young is vitally important if you want to grow trees that produce well every year but are also a lot easier to manage the fifth and final technique for pruning is understanding when to prune so the best time to prune your fruit trees is going to be when the trees are in dormancy after a frost come and they've dropped all their leaves so pruning a tree when it's in full dormancy like this is going to be the the best vigor when the tree awakens in the spring just think about it when this tree went to sleep this was the size it was if we prune some of the branches out and stuff then the tree is going to be smaller but the roots are the same size they were last year so kind of to compensate for that the tree is going to grow with like a lot of vigor now if we want to have more bud break and increase the bud break on our trees then we can prune in the late spring and if we want if our trees are just growing way too vigorously and we want to slow them down to kind of de-energize the tree we can prune them after they've bloomed so there's kind of three a few different times when you can prune your trees when it comes to diseased wood or any anything like that you want to remove that at any point anytime you see diseased wood whether it be during the growing season or not you want to take that off if you want to increase the vigor of your tree you want to do it in full dormancy one thing we want to take into account is that pruning reduces the cold hardiness of the tree and that reduction of cold hardiness lasts for about 10 days so the tree is most susceptible to some cold damage within the first 48 hours so if we notice that the temperatures are going to drop down to about negative 20 degrees or lower we do not want to prune at that time we want to make sure we have a window where the tree has enough time that it can kind of recover from all the pruning that's gone on now that we understand the five techniques for pruning we can apply these techniques to whatever tree we're actually going to attack or going to prune so if we're going to do the peach tree we just use those techniques and make sure we're pruning that to an open center so i gave you the information of how to prune let's get a little bit into why we should prune so there's about seven reasons we should the first reason i went over earlier it's to increase the amount of light that gets to the tree the second reason we prune is to control the size of the tree and keep it in its allotted space so pruning is like a dwarfing process but you can't take a full-size tree and try to make a dwarf by pruning excessively something like that it's just gonna end up with so much regrowth and so much water shoots the third reason we prune is to increase the amount of air and circulation that tree gets that's super important for your open center trees like your peaches the fourth reason we're pruning is to reduce the crop load so something again going back to our peaches if we don't use thinning cuts thin out a lot of that wood then we're going to have so much fruit on the tree we're going to have to go out there and just thin the fruit ourselves it's going to be a lot of work or if we don't thin the tree is going to try to overproduce and we're going to end up with a lot of little fruit instead of some good fruit so reducing the crop load that is number four right boss this guy's always out here with me so we just had to cut to him just for a second to see how cute the guy is and then we'll get back to our list of seven he was whining a little bit he wanted a little bit of attention he said you got to give me just another a little bit more screen time so we'll give that to the big boss right here he's shivering a bit because it's getting cold out here so the fifth reason we want to prune especially for something like apples and pears is to renew some of the spurs as the spurs on the trees get older the quality of the fruit can drop off a bit so it's good to have some new spurs that are getting renewed on the apple and pear trees so that they have better fruit the sixth reason we want to prune is for limb selection we want to choose the limbs that are in the best position to give the tree the most amount of airflow and the most amount of light and the seventh reason to prune is to prune to the shape just like i showed you when it comes to peaches that open center shape when it comes to apples that central leader shape those are the seven reasons why we prune now we know how to prune and why to prune before i let you go there are just a couple more things that i want to go over one of them is that pruning is a cumulative process and it should be done over years if you haven't pruned your trees before and there's a lot of stuff that needs to be pruned out you don't want to do it all the first year if you over prune your trees then what's going to happen is they're going to show an excessive amount of growth and they're not going to focus on they're going to focus only on growth so again if you need to make a lot of cuts in your trees do it over a longer period of time doing it all one year it's uh it's just going to be too much on those trees and cause way too much stress the last thing that i want to mention is you want to understand where your trees fruit or how they fruit in order to understand the pruning process so for instance peaches plums those are going to fruit on one year old wood so wood that was grown from last year as opposed to your apple trees those are going to fruit on older wood on the spurs of the wood so understanding where your tree is going to fruit is gonna is gonna be able to guide you better better on what kind of cuts that you should actually make so i made this video because i wanted to simplify the process of pruning a little bit to try to give you guys some confidence going into the pruning process but just know that like i mentioned earlier pruning is a cumulative thing so if you make a mistake that's okay you always have next year or the year after the idea is that you want to understand what the what the cuts are and what they do so that you could understand how to best shape your tree and get the most out of it while also making it easier on yourself that's why training is important too so with all these techniques combined and a little bit of uh you know a little bit of you know kind of throwing yourself out there to make some of the cuts i think it's going to result in in more fruit in the future but you're also going to get a better understanding of the way the tree grows and you're going to have like a more of like a appreciation for the tree the shape and it's just going to make you understand the whole process even more so i hope i broke this down enough to simplify things if you guys want to see uh maybe a video where i just show you how to prune a peach tree or just show you how to prune an apple tree let me know in the comments but this was more of like an overall understanding of why to prune and how to actually prune and with these techniques i'm confident that it can essentially change your pruning life it can give you more confidence moving forward and it'll make it so you get more fruit higher quality fruit and you can enjoy the whole process of gardening even more that's today's video growers thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you got something out of it the temperature is really dropping look at how he's shaking over there let's see if he'll shake on camera not really he's trying he's trying to play it tough but he's chilly i'm chilly there's not much sun but it's perfect day to actually prune another thing i didn't mention was when you're pruning make sure you wear some glasses too because you don't want any of the branches hitting you in the eye that could be really dangerous i wasn't doing too much hands-on pruning so i wasn't really doing it as much but me and tech wanted to say thanks to everybody for watching the video for grabbing some of the merch and if you haven't grabbed any yet make sure to grab some if you want some for the holiday season or something the tuck merch i think it came out great again the sweatshirts run a little small not super small but a little small so make sure you check that out at james pergione.com grab a sweatshirt i wanted to also thank one of our new channel members the thin blue line thanks for being a part of team grow thanks for contributing to the channel we hope you got and everyone got some value out of this video and that you feel more confident and well equipped heading into the pruning process james and tuck will be back to you again real soon we out