How to Prune a Peach Tree in 4 Simple Steps!

What's going on, growers? It's James Persiglione coming to you live from Jersey. Today, me and Tuck are going to show you how to easily prune a peach tree to maximize production. Let's go! When it comes to growing peach trees, I consider pruning to be one of the most important factors that leads to healthy, productive trees. A well-pruned tree will bear large, healthy fruit and will be less susceptible to disease. Before we start making cuts in our peach tree, we need And to understand that better, let's first take a look at an apple tree. So, apple trees grow best in the form of what's known as a central leader, where one main stem grows up the whole entire tree and then our main branches, also called scaffolds, grow off the side of that, as opposed to a peach tree that grows best in the form known as an open center and it's more like a vase shape. If your tree is at the age of production and you didn't prune it to an open center, that's okay. It doesn't have to be pruned to the shape. Just know that this is the The main thing we need to keep in mind is that peaches produce fruit on one-year-old growth. So, that's going to be last year's growth and this is going to be your redwood. And the redwood that's the best is the one that is pencil sized because this wood will be strong enough to actually bear the weight of the peaches as they mature. Now that we understand where the fruit will be on this peach tree and the most effective form for this peach tree to grow in, next we can move on to the pruning process. And if you're just planting a young peach tree, I'll show you how to set up this young peach tree to grow in this open center form after I actually prune this mature tree. The first thing we want to do is remove any of the diseased or broken branches. Anytime you see a diseased branch on your peach tree or any of your trees, you want to remove that regardless of what time of year it is. So, notice this doesn't have any of the good redwood. It just doesn't look like a good branch. It looks like it could be diseased. So, we're going to remove that one. We're also going to remove this one here. Same thing. And I'm going to remove this one right here. So, any of these branches that we see that look like they could have some disease or any issues with them, we want to take them out. Notice that I'm pruning this tree when it's in full dormancy. That's the best time to prune your peach trees. The second thing we want to do is maintain the open center of this tree. So, to do that, we want to remove any of the upright vigorous shoots that are growing on the inside of the tree, like this one. Notice it's growing towards the inside of the tree and it's vigorous. It's really upright. We're just going to cut this one out. If you have some shoots that are about pencil size at the center of your tree, like something like this, that's going to bear fruit, you could leave this. We're just going to shorten it a bit here because this will actually have fruit on it. What we want to remove is these vigorous upright shoots, like this one right here. So, we're going to take that one out as well. Just take this, cut it right out, just like that. We're going to do the same thing for any of the shoots that we see on the, on the inside of the tree that are facing towards the center and are quite vigorous. Notice here we have another upright shoot growing towards the center. I'm going to cut it just right here so I can maintain this branch right here which will have good fruit on it. And our main goal here is really to improve the air movement and the light because air and light are the enemies of disease. So, by doing this we're going to really avoid some disease issues. It's always better to prevent the disease issue than having to manage it. It's much harder to manage it. A lot of you've been asking how the little boss is doing. He's doing pretty well. We've got him on the prednisone now for his tracheal collapse so it's helping him manage through the tougher months but he's doing good and he's, he's in high spirits, this little boss. So, thanks for all the like people asking questions about him and sharing love with him and stuff. We really appreciate it a lot and that's why one of the reasons we made these shirts right here for the little guy. So, if you want to grab one you can still grab one down at jamespergione.com. It's important to know that peach trees grow very vigorously and they need heavy pruning as opposed to something like apples. If you prune your apples heavy you're all you're going to do is just make the tree produce a lot of shoots and a lot of leaf production because apple produce fruit on old wood as opposed to your peaches which produce fruit on the one-year-old wood. This is kind of like the new wood only from last year. So, what we have to do is prune out a lot of this wood because we need not only to set this tree up for production this year but we need a lot of renewed wood for the following year. So, it may seem like it's a lot and it's kind of intense but when it comes to your peach trees you can prune out about 40 percent of the new growth. This way you'll have a lot of regrowth for next year and you'll be renewing your fruiting wood. The third thing we want to do when pruning our peach trees is to maintain and control the size and the height of the tree. So, the way we're going to do this is we're going to prune out some of these upright branches that you see that are going straight up. We're going to prune these to more side branches. Ideally we want this tree the branch to be growing out at about a 45 degree angle. So, I'm going to prune out these tall branches here that are making the tree taller than it needs to be. So, first we're going to take this out here. I'm going to remove this one as well. Now, you'll notice the tree's growing out at more of a 45 degree angle. This is going to make the tree much shorter, easier to maintain, easier to get fruit on and stuff. Now, I'm going to show you a pretty intense cut. What I want to do is take this tree a lot lower. In the east coast where I'm at you basically have to cover all your peaches with the kaolin clay or the plum curculio is going to get to them. So, I'd rather have my tree much shorter, easier to spray, easier to maintain than having to get up on a ladder or something. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this whole upright branch here and I'm going to prune it to this outward growth here where we have a lot of nice little branches that will have a good amount of fruit on them. So, let's take this actual real tall one up right here. It's an intense cut but it's going to be better in the long run. So, there we go. Notice how we're moving more at like a 45 degree angle, the branching. Good fruiting wood out here and that really brings down the height of the tree. The fourth thing we want to do when pruning our peach trees is we actually want to reduce the crop load. So, your peaches are going to always produce way more fruit than they need to or than they should. So, it's easier to prune out a lot of the poor quality fruiting wood than having to go back and thin out the peaches because there's just way too many peaches on your tree. So, what we want to do is remove this poor quality fruiting wood. Some of the stuff that's a little small like let's see right here. Some of this branch right here. Even though it's going to have fruit on it, it's really thin. It's weak. We're just going to remove something that right there. So, that small thin wood. We also want to remove any of the wood, the redwood growing straight up because what we want to do is have more of our redwood that's going off to the sides. This is what will allow the most light to penetrate the peaches and the tree. When the peaches themselves too get more light and more airflow, you're going have a way better chance of actually getting that fruit to maturity. So, we're going to remove a lot of this wood growing straight up here and this wood here crossing over. So, a lot of this straight up wood. I'm just going to remove all of it. You're always going to have more peaches basically than you can even manage and thinning is a pretty tedious task. It's better to thin your trees by just removing all the poor quality wood. So, let's take this one out of here and let me bring you over here. If you have a branch like this that's fruiting wood that's longer, we want only want our wood to be about 12 to 18 inches. If it's about 24 inches or longer, we want to cut that back and what that's going to do is it's going to stiffen the branch and it's going to be make it stronger so it can hold the fruit as it matures. Now that I started pruning this main scaffold, I'm going to show you how I would continue to prune this whole scaffold out so that it's ready to head into production and I'll just explain some of the cuts that I'm making and why I'm doing them. So, I told you earlier that we're going to remove a lot of the upright stuff like right here. Let's take this out. This one's going upright as well. We also want to remove some of the stuff that's pointed down because that's not going to get good light also. I'm going to take this off here. I'm going to shorten this back just a bit to stiffen it. We'll remove this. I'm going to cut this out because it's small and spindly. We'll shorten this one, stiffen it, shorten this one stiffen it. This one is pointed is, even though it's not pointed down, this is a better option. So, I'm going to remove this one because this branch right here is blocking the light to the one below it. So, I'm going to take that out. This branch is kind of going towards the center. I'm going to remove that out as well as this one. Then I'm going to take this out because it's small and spindly. Then here, these are nice branches, but there's too many of them here. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this center right here. That's going to make this one still a little bit too long. We're going to shorten it to stiffen it. I'll take this out because it's smaller and I'll shorten and stiffen this one. This way you can see it's going to get good light and there's not going to be too many peaches, which has always been an issue for me in the past. Too many peaches I leave on the trees. Let's take this one out because it's pointed straight up. This one's a little spindly. We'll shorten this and then see what the rest of this here. I'm going to take this out, shorten this one a bit, remove this because it's spindly, shorten this to stiffen it up. This one here, it looks like a diseased branch. We're going to remove it. This one's pointed down, but I may, let me think because maybe I want to remove this to maintain the height to keep it nice and short. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this off right here, make it a bit shorter, take this off down here. Then this one needs to be shortened like that. This down here, I don't like it. I'm going to take it off and that's how it's going to be. So we've got a lot of the branches that are pencil sized. They're shortened a bit so they're nice and they'll stiffen. They'll be strong. They'll be able to hold the fruit. The same principles that I apply to the same branch and that I shared with you earlier, I'm going to apply to the this whole entire tree. Then I'm going to show you what it looks like when it's all finished. So it looked like I took a lot out, but again, when it comes to peaches, there's pretty much always too much fruit. So by doing this, we're going to make less work because the thinning of the fruit is one of the most time consuming things. And when it comes down to it, you want about six inches between each peach, because if you don't have the space between the peach, the peaches are going to get larger. They're going to start touching and then they're going to, they're going to not allow enough airflow and light and you're going to get fungal issues. And that's something you always want to prevent instead of having to deal with. Like I mentioned earlier, I first planted this tree back in the spring of 2018. When I first planted the tree, I cut the tree down to the height of about 30 inches. The reason I did this was because it removed that central leader and opened it up to a open center. So when I removed that central leader, what it did was it forced the lateral branches to become the dominant branches. And that's what we have here. I chose three lateral branches. Those became my main branches, what are known as scaffolds. And what you want is these scaffolds to be at an angle of about 45 degrees. This way they're really strong. If you have branches that have tight branch angles, then they're more liable to break when the fruit gets heavy. But with something like a peach, you want these main scaffold branches to be at about a 45 degree angle. So after I did that, I trained my scaffolds to where, say about a foot or two feet after this main branch, it splits off into another branch. You see right here, this main scaffold splits off. And then after about two to three feet, this scaffold splits off again. So you've got the three main branches, about two feet or so, it splits off in other directions. And then now it goes up about two more feet, maybe three feet, and it splits off again. What this does is it creates the shape where we can get the most light into the tree. And that's ideally what we want. And that's why it's really important to train these trees when they're young, because it makes for less cuts later as they get older. And it just makes it so you're not really wasting any years, wasting any growth. You're really getting the most out of the tree by having the correct structure and training it and pruning it right at the start. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I hope you feel better equipped and more confident to get out there and prune your peach trees. It might seem intense cutting out so much of the growth, but when it comes down to it, we grow peach trees to actually get fruit from them, not to just grow leaves. So in the long run, if you want to get more fruit, you really got to get out there and get your trees pruned. Me and Tuck had a blast out here. A lot of fun. We're prepping our beds, getting ready for spring. We're going to come out with some videos soon showing you guys how to prep for spring as well. Just stay tuned. And we wanted to thank one of our new channel members, Patricia Wells. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here and everything that we will continue to do. Also, check out some of the merch at jamespergione.com if you want to grab a Tuck shirt, if you want to some Grow shirts or anything else. Tuck and James will be back to you again real soon.