Do THIS Right NOW to Your Peaches For Healthier Trees and Better Fruit

If you're growing peach trees, check it out. You're going to want to learn how to do a summer pruning because it's super important. Your peach trees are growing really fast. They put on a ton of growth and they might look amazing. But if you want to keep them looking amazing, healthy and producing fruit next year, you really want to make sure that you do a summer pruning. I'm going to show you everything you need to know about how to do it. So let's get started. When we first pruned this tree in the wintertime, we took out the main central leader. That's the act of taking out the center growth point, basically leaving an open center. And that's where it gets its name for an open center growth habit. So as the tree has filled in, we've really lost a lot of that open center because the leaves have really grown fast. Under good growing conditions, warm weather, little disease pressure, little pest pressure, and good fertile soil, your peach trees can easily grow two to three feet in a single season. They just grow like crazy. These trees have easily put on probably about two and a half feet of growth already this year. And we've come time to doing a summer pruning. Now, what is that time? Right now, from late June through late July, there's only about a one month window where you can do a summer pruning because after that, what can happen is it can actually start to force secondary growth, which will actually continue to make it a little more kind of almost counterproductive because what you're going to do when you prune, pruning can either stimulate growth or it can reduce growth. Now, by pruning in kind of the July season, what we're doing is we are essentially reducing growth. We're essentially telling the plant, I want you to stop growing because there's a ton of auxin. Auxin is a growth regulator. And that auxin is growing up into these tips and it's actually causing it to elongate and continue to grow to the sky. And what we're doing is we're essentially deadheading that and stopping it so that it actually will stop growing right now rather than do it later in the season once all that growth has already happened. We do it, if we were to do it in say like late August, what would happen is it would actually send a signal to the tree that it actually needs to start producing new secondary growth. And that's really going to be very bushy and it's going to really kind of crowd airflow, which we don't want. So what we want to do is we want to prune in July to essentially reduce growth, but we also want to open up and increase airflow by doing it the right way. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to prune back into the center of this tree here to again, kind of open this up because there's a lot of growth that has grown this year in the center of the tree. And so anything growing into the center of the tree, we're going to simply come through here, we're going to peel the branches back as much as possible and anything growing in the center of the tree, we are going to cut out and prune so that we have a nice open center on the tree. That is going to open up sunlight, it's going to ripen your fruit better, it's going to give you better fruit quality and it's going to reduce disease because your tree needs to breathe. And essentially what we're doing is we're letting it breathe. All that new growth can sometimes kind of choke the tree out. So I'm just working on the center here and then when I'm done, we're going to go handheld off the tripod and we're going to try to show you guys the center of this because it's really dense. It's hard to kind of see from where you're at from this specific angle what we're doing, but I'm just basically working the center. I'm just getting all that center foliage pruned out and it's looking really good already. The second thing we're going to do with summer pruning is we're going to prune for airflow. So we prune for sun exposure and some airflow by pruning out the center. Sunlight is the most important part because sunlight will help to ripen your fruit when you get it. Sunlight will also help to make sure that the tree can grow and photosynthesize and create energy, but pruning the center also reduces restricted airflow. So you're doing a lot when you prune the center out. But the next thing we want to do is we want to come out to the edges here and we want to go and kind of follow the branches. It's really kind of a little overwhelming, I'll be honest, because peaches, they just grow so much so fast and when they're young like this, a lot of the branches are really closely stacked and so in the wintertime, that's where we're going to come through and we're actually going to do some aggressive pruning, pruning upwards of 30% of the tree back in the winter for proper shape. But what we want to do is simply in the summertime, we want to stop and limit that growth of the new growth that's growing up and in to the other growth. Now in the springtime, these are known as water sprouts. You can get water sprouts in the summer as well, but typically what you're going to find is water sprouts grow straight up and off these lateral branches, there's one here and it's growing up into this one. When they're young, they don't have any weight on them. You have to remember when these get peaches on them, they're going to weigh down and they're going to bend and that's going to be great for limb dispersion. It's going to help to bend those leaves down and give you a good shape. When all these leaves are growing up, it can be a little bit deceptive, but we still want to go through if possible because we've only pruned about maybe seven to 10% of this tree so far and we can prune up to about 15 to 20%. You don't want to prune more than that otherwise you can really stress the tree out, but we still have some more kind of of this percentage of overall plant material that we can prune. So what I want to do is I want to focus on these outer limbs here and I want to find some limbs that are kind of competing. And so what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're basically going to look and we're basically going to find branches that are really growing in and competing for overall space. And so I'm going to take out this one down here. That's really just growing up into the rest of the branch. And then I'm going to come down here and I'm going to prune same thing. This one here. So it was just growing up in. It was on a lower lateral branch growing up into this secondary layer of lateral branches. And ultimately, even if it gets fruit on it, it's still going to be too close to one another to really be anything meaningful. So it can come out. So as I walk around here, I'm basically just finding all those branches that are growing upright. What really helps when the trees are young and they're very flexible is I'll take the limb, I'll take the branch and I'll bend it down just as if there were peaches on it. And that helps me to understand what that branch is going to look like with weight on it, because right now there's no weight on them. So by pulling them down, I can actually get a representation of what is going to be a problem and what is not. And so after pruning, I can see after pulling this down to about a 45 degree angle, I can see that some of these branches are just going to naturally become more of a problem than others. And those are all what is going. And I want to get rid of those because they're ultimately just going to be growing up and reducing that airflow and creating disease. You want to make sure, peaches are quite a disease prone crop. All stone fruits are pretty disease prone. You want to make sure that you restrict that crowding, reduce the crowding if at all possible. And that is the whole point of summer pruning is just pruning all of this upward growth, all this upward growth, so we can prioritize the outward open center. And that is going to give you a tremendously healthy plant that not only produces a ton of fruit, but has really high quality fruit at that. I'm actually going to come in here. I'm going to prune this whole branch out entirely because it's just kind of messing things up. And aside from a couple other little odds and ends, you'll notice that I am taking the cuttings and disposing them away. It's really important that you do that as well, because when you essentially are pruning, you're stressing the tree and you're putting the plant material right below the tree. Well, that can actually be a highway for pests like aphids, ants, white fly. You can get a lot of different insects that actually come in on your fruit trees. And so many of them come in because you're putting the prunings, even diseased branches, throw them into the grass, mow them up, throw them in the compost pile. Try to keep underneath my tree fairly clean, and that just really reduces disease. But other than that, like I said, I'm going through this with a fine tooth comb now. All the major things have been cut out. And I really honestly think that this looks just so much better. So in summary, we are pruning for reducing growth. We are limiting the amount of growth. We are increasing airflow. We are increasing the center of the plant. And last but not least, we are cleaning up the shape so that when it does hold fruit, you have good fruit set at a good space apart so that you don't have stuff just stacked on top of each other, where you're going to have rubbing of branches, increased disease pressure, potential for increased pest pressure, and you should be off to the races. Summer pruning is really quick. It is really simple. You don't have to go through it and spend 20, 30 minutes doing it. It's a quick little project that is going to pay huge dividends in the long run next year with healthier fruit. So I hope you guys enjoyed. I hope you all learned something new. Get out there. July is the time to do it. Get out there, do some summer pruning on your peaches. You'll thank me later. And as always, this is Luke from the Mike Gardner channel, reminding you to grow bigger. See ya. Hey, thank you so much for watching today's video. 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