Pruning fruit trees: apple, pear, cherry and plum

Prune apples and pears in winter, cherries and plums in summer. How to prune a young fruit tree and an old one, and how to avoid silver leaf and gummosis.

You prune fruit trees to get more and better fruit, an open crown that dries quickly after rain, and a tree you can pick without a ladder. The key difference: you prune pome fruit (apple, pear) in winter and stone fruit (cherry, plum, peach) in summer.

Apple and pear: winter pruning

Prune apple and pear trees from December to March, on frost-free days. Without the leaves you can clearly see how the crown is built up.

• First remove dead, diseased and crossing branches, and any branches growing inwards.
• Cut out water shoots: the long, dead-straight shoots that grow vertically upwards.
• Keep the crown open, so that light and air can reach the fruit. As the saying goes, a bird should be able to fly straight through it.
• Spare the fruiting wood: short, knobbly twigs (spurs) with fat, round flower buds.

A summer pruning in July–August slows growth down: shorten the long new shoots to a few leaves. This is especially useful for espaliers and small trees.

Cherry, plum and peach: summer pruning

Prune sweet cherry, sour cherry, plum and peach in summer, in dry weather, ideally straight after harvest. Wounds made in autumn and winter leave the tree open to silver leaf (silvery leaves, dying branches) and gummosis (sticky gum oozing from the bark).

• Prune lightly: thin out the crown and remove crossing branches.
• A peach fruits on last year’s shoots. So every year, cut some of the branches that have fruited back to a young shoot.
• A sour cherry (the morello, or kriek as Belgians call it) also fruits on young wood and can be pruned a little harder each year.

• Fruit treeAppleMalus
• Fruit treePearPyrus communis
• Fruit treeWild cherryPrunus avium
• Fruit treeSour cherryPrunus cerasus
• Fruit treePlumPrunus domestica
• Fruit treePeachPrunus persica
• Fruit treeQuinceCydonia oblonga
• Fruit treeMedlarMespilus germanica

A young tree: formative pruning

For the first three to five years, you give the tree a strong framework:

1. Choose a straight central leader and remove any competing tops.
2. Choose three or four scaffold branches spaced evenly around the trunk, ideally at a wide angle.
3. Every winter, cut these scaffold branches back by about a third, just above an outward-facing bud.

An old, neglected tree

Don’t cut back an old standard tree that hasn’t been pruned for years all in one go: it will respond with a thicket of water shoots. Spread the work over two to three winters, and never remove more than a quarter of the crown at a time. Old standard trees with hollows are also valuable for little owls and woodpeckers.

Tools and hygiene

• Sharp secateurs, loppers and a pruning saw.
• Disinfect your tools (e.g. with alcohol) after working on a diseased tree, especially in the case of fireblight: scorched, blackened shoots that curl over like a shepherd’s crook. Cut these out generously, up to 50 cm into healthy wood, and burn or dispose of the prunings.