How to Prune Pomegranate Trees for BIG Harvest

I'm standing next to what produces one of the most delicious and honestly nutritious fruits on planet earth but right now it looks absolutely gross disgusting and terrible and that's what we're here to solve in this video. We're going to prune a pomegranate tree the right way and it's honestly confusing and somewhat dangerous because there's a lot of spikes on this guy so I need to suit up. Remember when you're pruning a pomegranate tree always use protection. It's very spiky so what we need to do is understand the anatomy of the pomegranate. It is not like many other trees. I have this beautiful apple right here. This guy kind of grows like a normal tree. You have one main trunk coming up and then you just sort of do some strategic pruning of the actual branches themselves. And a lot of these types of trees like a peach or an apple, they want this sort of open vase structure, open canopy structure where the interior is very hollowed out and and the exterior has a lot of branches and growth. Whereas pomegranates, if you look really close down here at the bottom, you will notice it is not just one trunk coming out of the ground. In fact, on this variety here, I count about four larger trunks and some smaller ones. So we're going to start down at the bottom and trim that up a bit. Okay, so down here at the base, contrary to many trees, you can leave more than one of these trunks coming out on a pomegranate. I think a good rule of thumb is anywhere between three and six. More than that, you're going to hamper production and actually the middle of the tree is just going to get too crowded, too busy, and impede on its own ability to generate energy from the leaves and then of course create pomegranates. So what I'm doing here is I want to count this out. I've got one big trunk. That's kind of the one that we started with. We've got one here, we have one other right there. And then finally one shooting off to the left side here. These small guys are what are called water sprouts. These are coming off and out. So I'm going to chop these off. They're never really going to become a full trunk, or even if they are, like I mentioned, I don't really want to keep them. You've got to use some loppers for this because it is very spiky to get in there. So I recommend using the loppers. I'm also going to come through and thin out some of these branches that are coming off of a main trunk but are just kind of pointing right at the ground. So you see this one right here. You can tell I did have at least the remnants of a pomegranate on this one, but it was developing on the ground, which means that all sorts of things can come in and start to munch on it. I don't want them hitting the ground if I can avoid it. So I'm going to take that one off. All right, next up, I've cleaned the bottom out. Now you do want to adhere to one of the rules that you would use for most tree pruning, which would be dead disease damage or crossing. So 3Ds plus the C of crossing. You don't want stuff crossing into the plant. So take this branch right here, for example. You can see most of these offshoots are coming outwards, which is what we want. We do not want something like, it's going to be hard to see, but there's one down here at the bottom that's growing on the interior and just kind of growing inwards. So I'll pull it out here. What this would have done is basically grow back in through the center of the plant crossing the center and basically not getting enough nutrients or resources to develop while also tangling up the interior. So the next step is come through and clean out anything that is crossing. So far we've cleaned the bottom out and we've cleaned a lot of the crossing branches. There's still some more to hit but the next thing you want to think about, and this goes for pruning any tree, but pomegranates especially, know how that fruit's going to get produced and how that eventual fruit is going to stress the plant. For example, on an apple, on a peach back here, I know if I have a branch that's really long, let's say maybe like, you know, this guy right over here, and I'm going to get three, four, five peaches hanging out over here, that's not going to be very nice to that branch because What's going to happen? It's going to crank down like this. So what I want to do both to prune the overall structure of the tree, but also to help the branches themselves support the eventual pomegranates that they're going to grow is do some tip pruning. So when you think about tip pruning, what you're doing here is you're taking a branch, something like this, maybe this is about two or so feet long. The most you would ever really want to take off is about a third of it or so, maybe a fourth. I'm going to be pretty conservative here. I'm doing it for shape, but i'm also doing it for the length of the actual branch so i'm just going to come in like that spiky just sticks right to you do it at a 45 degree angle if you can because water won't sit on that that cut as much which is pretty helpful just make a little pruning tip cut there especially for height you're going to get most your pomegranates lower at least i have over the last couple years but i don't want to be reaching up this tall to get a pomegranate so i'm going to do a little bit of height pruning as well. Especially on branches that are emanating from a trunk and then you have multiple branches coming off, you got to remember, eventually, let's say there's like 10 pomegranates here, which that would be a lot, but let's just imagine, all that stress is going to eventually be supported by that individual trunk. And this trunk right here, even to a bit of a touch, is a bit flimsy, which to me means all of these offshoots here, that's a bit excessive for this particular trunk. So I'm going to get a little little bit more aggressive with my pruning here and I may even take off some of the major offshoots on this trunk in general. And when I do that, you have two ways that you can cut with a pruner. You can cut with the non-blade side facing the edge or you can cut with the blade side. You're going to want to cut with the blade side because you're going to get a much more flush cut that way, which is just good pruning practice. Again, here's another example of a really long trunk with a double offshoot here with a ton of shoots coming off this way. That's going not only into my apple area, but also into the pathway between my citrus and the rest of my orchard. This is a spiky plant, like I've said, so I'm actually going to make an aggressive cut here and bring this all the way back to here. Maybe even knowing that I've just sacrificed a little bit of pomegranate production, which is why I have two bushes. I'd rather have a more shrubby like pomegranate that I get a little bit less yield off of that doesn't spike me when I walk down the pathway. Now you'll notice that as I prune this, of course there are no leaves on the pomegranate. It's because when you're doing a sort of dormancy period pruning like this, of course the tree has to be dormant, which would be your late winter, very early spring pruning. Pomegranates for most people are going to be fruiting even up until maybe October, November. So you have a lot of time if you do a cut like this. You don't want to do it as aggressively of course after it started producing its leaves for the season. And because these branches are coming from, I would call it like the secondary main trunk here and they're going more straight up, I think it's fine to leave them a little bit taller and leave more of them in general because they're not going to get dragged down as much. I think they're just more supported by the underlying structure of the tree. So I'm not as worried about it. And again, you know, I still want pomegranates, So I'm not going to take off, you know, a crazy amount of foliage here or of structure. Back here, just paying attention to the shape of this overall tree, not wanting it to cram itself into the pathway or really to hit the other pomegranate as well too much. So this branch here is technically an offshoot of the main trunk. So it's also coming off at a very odd angle from the trunk down here. And it's very much a parallel to the ground angle, which means that any sort of pomegranate growth that's at this edge is going to put a lot of pressure on this branch. Now that might not be the worst thing in the world because of course it doesn't have to go that far to just rest on the ground, but I don't want the pomegranates resting on the ground like I mentioned. So I am going to take a fair amount of this off, but I'm not going to stress about it too much because structurally, if I was to remove this all the way back down to the main trunk, the overall look and shape of the tree would be thrown off. It just wouldn't look very aesthetic. It wouldn't look very good. And of course, I'd lose a lot of pome production. So I'm just going to take a lot of the tips off here and then I'm going to monitor it this season and see if it's growing a little bit too heavy on this side. So I'm in a pretty good spot here so far, but there are some over here that are coming almost straight down into the ground, which I do not want. And that'll clear up a little bit of the under canopy here. I found that if you don't harvest your pomegranates in time, they'll start to split open, which honestly, some people even wait until then to harvest but what that means is a lot of things are going to start noticing your pomegranates and the less ways you can give a creature to access it the better so i mean even rats will come in and and start to get on these guys so while i'm in here getting a little spiky i'm just going to prune out that interior just a touch more nice clean interior here getting rid of those water sprouts at the bottom like we did early on really key because they they're just going to soak up resources they're not going to give you any pomegranates ever and it's going to be a drain on the plant. So we've taken our pomegranate from a kind of unruly state to a much more stable state, still keeping with the four main trunks at the bottom. Now I do want to say you could prune your pomegranate to a single trunk and grow it up much like you would a normal tree. I've seen that done. It's a little bit more maintenance because pomegranates don't naturally want to grow that way. But what I'm going to do is check in with you guys in a month or two to show you the structure of this tree as we've pruned it. I gotta be honest guys, I feel like these pomegranates have a new lease on life. It's only been about a month or a month and a half and both varieties are growing in with extremely healthy leaves. Not only that, there are a ton of new and healthy pomegranate blossoms. This sort of waxy red flower, very beautiful even just in the flowering phase. Now a couple things that I want to mention. Being aggressive with that prune, really getting a lot of that middle overlapping growth out, getting some of those extra stems peeking out of the ground out, thinning it down to about three to six, I think did a lot here. Bringing the height down, evening that bush out really, really helped. Now it's spring, or at least it should be, when your pomegranates are at this phase post pruning. I'm gonna show you what you need to do next to set them up to get those beautiful poms come fall. So here we are at the base of the pomegranate. Obviously any weeds around the base of the plant at this point, you're going to want to claw back. You don't need to get too crazy. If there's some weeds, it's fine. And you can see, I even have a bit of sprouting of a young palm right here. I don't want that there either. So I'm going to pull that out. But what I'm really looking to do at this point is toss some fertilizer in all the way out to what you call the drip line on a tree. That's basically the end of the foliage in width. And so you can sprinkle a little bit of fertilizer all around this area of course around the back as well for this i'm using Happy Frog's 4-9-3 Fruit and Flower this is our official soil and fertilizer partner here at Epic Gardening we love their stuff we've been using it for years use what you have but we do recommend this one so after this you're going to want to scrape it in the ground just to touch nothing too crazy and then you can apply a little mulch in my case i just like to use compost as mulch so i'll throw compost on around the base this helps to seal in that fertilizer keeps a little bit more moisture around the plant and and of course breaks down over time as well. After your fertilizer and mulch, it's really just a matter of keeping the plant well watered and monitoring for any growth that's going totally out of control. For example, I can see this little piece right here is gonna wanna run up like crazy this season. I might go ahead and just snip this off now or when I actually have a tool that can do it because it's not gonna serve me. I don't want pomegranates up that high. But besides that, guys, palms are one of the most rewarding fruits you can grow in your garden. And if you do wanna give them a try but you don't know where to get them, Epic ships them directly to your door. We'll ship awesome, beautiful varieties in a variety of sizes as well at shop.epicgardening.com or the link in the description. More fruit tree care guides right here. We'll see you next time. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.