You're (Probably) Killing Your Fruit Trees

in a couple years if your tree dies it's probably because you forgot to take that off fruit trees are an enormous investment both financially when we're buying the trees but also time because it can be seven years between the day we plant our tree and the day we actually get fruit off that tree so many people plant their trees wait that seven years only to realize they've made a huge mistake I've been gardening for 12 years I have planted my fair share of fruit trees and had my fair share of mistakes but now that we're here settled on our forever Farm I want to make sure that I'm setting myself up for long-term success with every single thing that I put in the ground to that end I've invited my friend Daniel who has been an arborist and tree specialist for six years to tell me what I'm doing wrong before things get even worse Daniel hi hello hi thank you so much for coming to solve all the world's problems uh I have several different trees we want to look at some that are little like this and some that are very well established and I was hoping that you can tell me and you know a few hundred of my friends how to start at this stage when they're freshly planted and really take them through to you know when we're not seven years in finally getting our Fruit Harvest and our whole tree collapses or whatever right so to start off with this guy's been in the ground for two years or so uh yeah I think I planted this either last year the year before okay cool yeah um before you do heavy pruning you do want to have your trees get established because you know these leaves are their energy this is their solar panel to send this stuff into the roots right right okay and planting a new tree is super difficult super traumatic for the poor little guys and this is a perfect stage to address a lot of the issues that will become major headaches you know 5 10 20 years down the road essentially what you want with a fruit tree is you want a strong central leader okay and you want almost like tiers of lateral Branch coming out like a lower layer a mid layer and like a top layer so it looks like a nice little kind of you know even Crown you want short branches that are stocky with lots of lateral branches coming off oh look a little baby ladybug I was always so interested by the fact that this is truly what a little baby ladybug looks like because how could it then turn into that hard-shelled red little thing but the thing is we love ladybugs in the garden now that you mentioned that actually that totally makes sense here if we were to have an apple grow on this right now right I mean that's going to put a ton of weight on this and you know this far out of course that's going to just Lop it off the tree exactly and you might look like you know this tree over here has been in the ground longer um but if you have like 20 peaches at an end of a branch that's two inches thick it's going to do the exact same thing and also if you look you want these branches coming off the main stem to be a good ratio to this main stem you typically want them to be a third of the thickness or thinner so if this is the trunk of the tree the branches that are coming off of it we want them to be one-third or less so looking at these this one is maybe pushing it this is maybe a little bit too fat for its own good yeah I would say that one's too thick this one's too thick and then you run into the problem here of where you have two leads that are almost exactly the same thickness and what that is called it's called a codominant stem and as that grows it's going to push bark between those two leads rather than interwoven wood fibers and it's going to split in half in a windstorm or once the apples get too heavy so at this stage just the tree's young enough that taking a significant amount of the canopy isn't going to cause a lot of damage you know it's still young so what we want to do is take care of these issues kind of fix these ratios and then you know be good for a couple years and you'll be able to come back and address it and kind of you know do course correction if needed but for today you know we want to reduce this one this one and we essentially want to choose which one of these leads we want to be the the centerpiece you know the main lead one main tree limb to rule them all we'll choose one of those to be our very precious thing and we want to make sure that that one is the one that goes up and down and that one gets the most sunlight possible this is pretty sparse right now but trimming it now will set us up for Success later because I have as you'll see later on trees that I didn't trim properly that now are in their Prime fruit bearing ears and in danger of having huge issues as they get older so we'll start with these lower leads and if you look these guys are great they're growing they're a good ratio to the trunk and they're growing at 45 degree angle or less like these are textbook great branches these guys we're gonna do reduce them and that's called subordination so essentially we're slowing down their growth so that as the whole Tree Grows this rest of the tree is going to grow at a faster rate than these and it will fix that ratio hopefully and again after a couple years you can go back do some course Corrections take a little more there take a little less there but what you do is you follow down the stem and you try to find a lateral Branch that's about the third of the diameter of the branch you're taking a lot of rules of thirds you know you don't want these to be more than a third you want this to be at least a third so um this is one of those things where it's like Michael Scott explain to me like I'm five bilateral Branch you mean like these things that are kind of sticking out right not like this little nub in here right so this this would be considered like an auxiliary Bud essentially a lateral branch is essentially a more substantial growth out of the side of the main lead and you said that you want those to be angles usually that's usually growing from the trunk okay if you're looking at it and it's about a 45 degree angle or less that's a sign that it will be a good healthy attachment in the future if you look at these codominant stems that's a super tight angle if one of these were subordinated it'd still be just an incredibly tight angle acute angle is what maybe math people would say um okay so what I'm going to do is looking at this Branch it has a lot of weight on the end here and you go down and there's not a lot of growth this is probably our best option you know this is small but it counts as a branch you know it's about the third of the size and it has some growth there so I'll go and cut just above that crotch and then this will what that does if you cut back to lateral branch is this then takes over the dominant roll um and so it helps the tree heal faster and also reduces all those water sprouts and that's usually not a huge issue for these small trees bigger trees it becomes more of an issue and actually speaking of fall however especially somewhere like here where it's really humid I would imagine that that would open up the tree to all kinds of mold and fungal diseases and and in a time when all of the energy is like kind of going down into the root system and the tree is dormant I mean we're obviously in Spring tell us more about that yeah so I mean as far as fruit production the pruning after the Fruit Harvest you know makes sense but as far as pruning in the fall when the tree's dormant the fungus pathogens and things like that and wood rotting fungus are usually less active but they're still active yeah and that's just a longer amount of time that these wounds can remain open and to get a foothold you know lots of the most aggressive ones you know you think of split Gill um or even like oyster mushrooms like they tend to grow well in cold weather so pruning when it's warm and the tree is actively growing lets it the tree heal those small wounds you know very quickly you know in a matter of months and it's also good to prune the trees small like this because then you're not creating big wounds you know they're able to heal over and compartmentalize a lot faster so we want to do this at the beginning instead of having to cut off huge sections of an older established tree later on because that's just more danger there exactly okay um so we got this guy looking at this one this is an ideal lateral Branch coming off it's growing directly away from the center of the tree it's growing at a good angle that takes a lot of the end weight off but also gives us a good kind of bottom tier that's pretty equal with this one and also opens up the sunlight to hit all these other buds and branches on these leads and the lead that will become our precious will then take off and those branches will then become kind of the next tier great as we grow but these Buzz that are exposed to sunlight they're going to grow directly towards the Sun so if there's nothing above them they're just going to go straight up okay so the next year or next or the year after that you might have to go and kind of do what we just did and prune those ones back to a lateral Branch okay but now we come to the decision of which one is our precious and it's not the one Anna wants uh my precious is right here because it has four little my heart so if you look it would be fine at this stage of growth we can choose either one but the fruit production is going to take energy away from growing and since this little guy is struggling and he's not really struggling but you know compared to its friends compared to its friend at the same time we wanted as much energy to go towards growth rather than fruit production at this point for this little fella totally um and also if you look at this other lead back here it has these really nice evenly spaced buds that already are kind of turning into branches and since we just thinned these other um leads when the Sun hits those those are going to take off and turn into good branches and even more energy for the tree and so this one has basically none of those so this is the one that yeah it has got to go and so I with this guy I'm gonna take it all the way back to this bottom lateral bud this is like the whole tree but it's and this guy might one day be a really nice Branch who knows um and now we look we have These Guys subordinated these guys are good to go these are hopefully going to get more sun and grow faster and then we're left with this top where we need to choose you know keep establishing That central leader so me based on what you're you've just told me that we would probably take this and this is that right yeah and I don't think we need to take them all what I would do is just take a little snip here yep and a little snip here and that should be fine this guy can then grow can continue to grow straight up and be that strong central lead which is structurally really strong gives you that nice Branch attachment long term where you know it will handle loads of apples hopefully and this is another fun fact is in your excitement you know you want to some people keep the labels on so they know what it is in a couple years if your tree dies it's probably because you forgot to take that off if it's still on there because this can totally girdle a tree that's something unfortunately I deal with a lot is going and pruning people's trees and they just never took the tags off and the plastic totally girdled the tree the term girdle right there because I mean do you know where the term girdle came from women used to wear girdles to keep them from having the little muffin top that's absolutely going to develop around that label if we don't take it off this now is a great start for this tree you know it's a really good starting structure and again would like to thank this tree for great sacrifice So Daniel get some bigger fish to fry over here yes we do all right Daniel we've got this plum tree that ironically I planted at the same time as the cherry tree over there but this one is just for whatever reason really really Thrive basically what we talked about over there has led me to believe that we are already gonna have to get rid of some stuff I don't actually see a central lead so we'll have to do something about that and there are some plums but again we're going to kill our Darlings so that we have more Darlings later right right this has been in the ground for two years three years at the most three years so looking at that tree we just pruned compared to this tree this is a good example of why what we did there is so important where all these lower limbs have these really big ratio compared to the trunk you can already see where these branches are starting to pinch bark between the trunk which is a really weak Union and as they've grown they've either shaded out the central lead or forced the central lead to grow in a different direction okay if we look here this is probably the most Central Branch growing and as it grows up it just shoots straight off that way probably because of these tall branches combined with this Peach Tree here yeah so what we're going to do is we're essentially just going to choose our Central lead and then since we're looking at this and evaluating the health and it's growing so well that tells us we can probably take more often the tree will be fine however there's a flip side to that coin where if you prune a healthy vigorous tree heavily it's going to respond by setting sending it up even faster growth so next year you can anticipate it's going to be sending up a lot of sprouts what are called water sprouts which are basically just thin super fast growing vertical stems and then it will just be a matter of knocking those back every year to get back to your established structure okay let's kill those Darlings my friend all right let's do it I've been doing tree work for five to six years and during that entire time I've used chainsaws and pruners and all sorts of dangerous equipment every single day all day I've never cut myself with a chainsaw however I've cut myself with one of these things at least half a dozen times so based off of my experience I recommend always putting on some gloves before using these hand saws great I love it also it's probably worth mentioning that I have also cut myself with a pole saw more than any other tool actually it's a kind of a joke in our furniture classes because we usually cut like when we're making chairs we cut it we cut the spindles off with the pole saw and it's it's literally glue up day that everyone has Band-Aids all over their hands because it just pops right out and it gets you well so I'll be like up in a tree and I'll be like cutting a branch and just be like sewing really fast and then it will like give unexpectedly and I'll just go and like hit my knee and I'll leave like just like a trail of like it looks like a tattoo or something it's happened a bunch of times also like my pinky I always manage to just like worry I cut off the tip of my pinky but anyway gloves this guy this is going to be a heavier cut but it'll be worth it I'm gonna take this back to this Branch here all right there we go it's like a whole Plum Tree yeah Beautiful Goodbye so I mean I'm not I'm not gonna ask you to make me feel better about myself right now but I mean in not knowing what I didn't know did I set this tree back in its fruit production I mean because essentially it's put in probably years of growth into stuff that we're now cutting off right with uh how vigorous this tree is growing and how well it's doing yeah we maybe lost a year or two but what's a year or two it's a lot it's a year of Our Lives well plant a bunch more fruit trees and that way good you know the pain will be dispersed great great great um all right what else do we have to do this poor oh so much well so taking that was definitely a good call and I'm looking reevaluating my decisions and I think we're gonna re-establish this one as a central lead okay because it is more Central and it's already pretty vigorous so this is going to be our new precious that we want to preserve and protect and help everything else is secondary to our precious okay that's our precious all right so here goes another whole plum tree take this guy another whole plum tree this is okay oh you had to clip it right above the plum that's what you get when you prune your plum trees bad I wish if I had only just become friends with you three years sooner so I cut this even though it's a relatively small Branch it was growing very vertically and you see just how vigorous that is so it's like a foot of growth like because this is the this is last year's wood and this is this year's wood yeah so you know having that grow right on the end here I know by the end of the growing season that's already going to be shading out some of these interior branches here that we want to grow out and get established cool get rid of it all right I think we are good on this tree what's happening with this guy won't this cause a problem or tell me so what I did is you know if you look at how much we took off here like 17 plum trees worth yeah that's like probably 50 of this tree which is definitely more than you would normally want to take normally you don't want to take any more than a third okay however with like the state of everything you know how the structure was essentially compromised and how fast it's growing yep it seemed like it was a safe thing to do again we'll have to watch next year as these branches respond and you know kind of do their thing do their thing the more aggressive you are the faster they grow with a lot of fruit trees and you'll probably be bummed that the tree looks like it's leaning more because of the central lead we chose oh it does but how do we stop the lean but now having heard everything you've told me about like basically the tree is going to grow to where the light is I think the next thing we need to do is tackle that bad boy so that we can get some more light to this so it doesn't keep just growing further and further away exactly and you know once we get that guy taken care of and with the stuff we've done here a lot of these interior buds along are precious they're going to take off cool and hopefully become substantial limbs that will bear fruit and help the overall structure but yeah this is kind of like an emergency situation due to my former neglect of this tree unintentional because I actually have trimmed these trees but this therein lies the thing is that like I didn't really know what I was doing I was making sure that I was making a beautiful little quaff right for visual purposes but not understanding exactly what we were trying to do and the thing is as things progress with this understanding you can still achieve that perfect little quaff or whatever you want to call it but the structure will be established so that you know you have the different kind of tiers and you know plant variety and plant genetics play a big role as well where sometimes the branches they send up just tend to be more vertical on some trees but the lighting is usually the biggest Factor where you know the branches are going to grow towards the light if there's a branch above it it'll grow horizontal towards the light but if there's light directly above it'll grow straight up all right Daniel I want to show you my pride and joy I want you to know I planted this Peach Tree three years ago this is year four for her wow I planted her at the same time as all the others and last year I picked 80 delicious edible peaches off of her but I have a feeling that we're about to give her a summer haircut yeah I have bad news for you your tree's doomed ay I mean what is this what do you have going on here what is this I told you I'm a little OCD and it was growing crooked and I imagine it's probably going to damage the bark long term if we leave it on so should we get that off yeah so it's a complete waste of time and also damaging the bark cool but essentially um no I get what you're trying to do but you just we're doing it wrong you're just doing it wrong that's okay um but when you take it off while you explain to me yeah when you have a support like that with the tree the trees are constantly responding to their environment you know whether it's the light the wind you know shade all of that stuff so you know lots of people when they plant new trees they'll go and they'll stake you know steak it so it won't move it all in the wind but what that ends up doing is the tree isn't responding to the wind so the second they take away those steaks the tree will either blow over or break so being able to respond to their environment is essential for a healthy tree and so getting support like that it's probably feeling it's probably doing the opposite of what you want by putting a bunch of extra you know strength on this side where it's getting pulled towards sure and this side where you know it's actually leaning the knee strength it's probably neglecting and okay it's short-term enough that it's not a huge issue yeah a few weeks ago but that's essentially what happens when you will stake a tree is it won't respond to its environment it will respond to the stakes and so that way when you take the stakes off um it won't be prepared for the conditions it's living in or you'll keep the stakes on too long and it will end up damaging or killing the tree so I actually think that's probably pretty huge because a lot of people will stake their trees between you know two things when they're first planting them and in so doing I mean we live in a really windy spot so you know if the tree doesn't have its own natural ability like if it's not encouraged to send down deep roots send out wide Roots that'll help it to withstand that wind then like it makes total sense that it would just blow right over yeah and so you know granted if you live in a windy area and you plant a new tree it keeps blowing over it you got to fix that so if you're going to stake a tree you want to have enough slack in the stake so that the tree can remove and respond to the wind but that the steak and rope will catch the tree before it goes too far and that way it will respond to its environment and you'll be able to take that steak material away once the tree is established after a year or two hopefully all right so aside so um you said it's been here for three years yeah it's just incredible grown like crazy a super healthy tree and you already took quite a few limbs off this spring right yeah I did well I took one major limb right here yeah and here because they were just I mean I knew at least I knew that much right right um so since you already pruned some from this tree this year and it is doing really well so we'll probably be able to take quite a bit off um but we want to probably not be as aggressive as we were with the other tree because I've already taken like a big chunk right yeah and so what we'll do in this is probably go in stages and also kind of like that last tree this one it's really hard to find something that would work as a central lead I've looked and honestly there's no clear candidates so mostly what we'll be doing today is reducing some of these limbs back just so there isn't so much leverage in the future as that fruit grows and matures okay next year you might be able to take a little bit more and a little bit more you know reading the tree and seeing how much it's growing how it's responding lots of times you can tell if you take off too much because the following year it will send up like we were talking about that one just really aggressive uh Sprouts or it'll start sprouting from the base more and stuff like that that's usually a sign that you were pretty heavy-handed okay which as long as you're anticipating it you know you can adjust accordingly yeah but for this guy today we just want to keep it from breaking you know once you get that plentiful Peach Harvest because I can already see quite a few right when we're planting fruit trees we have the initial cost of the tree and of course if we spend more money we can get a more established tree that's going to get us closer to an eventual Fruit Harvest but with this tree in particular because it's already producing fruit it's that much more precious to me I have four years invested in the fruit that's going to come off of this tree but because I didn't really know what I was doing when I was first planting it and first pruning it there is a genuine concern especially after talking to Daniel about how fruit trees grow and how they should be pruned about the fruit actually weighing down the branches at the end creating leverage that would actually split this tree apart and after putting three to four years into this tree the thought of it splitting due to the weight of the fruit and then becoming a useless tree and having to start all over again is yucky all right well you can see already one of the issues that we have which is uh rats attacking the tree also you can just watch me struggle pulling this out and um I want to I want to try pulling it out well I already loosened it yeah I have massively loosened it already so if he's able to get it out it's due to my own you broke it good I think it's stuck on a route I think if you try to pull it out with a tractor it's going to pull the tree out no no that is really strange though because it does seem like it should come out we're gonna spend the rest of the evening trying to get this thing out yes that and put there for no reason well that's most of what my entire life is is undoing things that seemed like a good idea at the time when I am looking at reducing limbs that are really heavy um I will pick the strongest most Central lead and reduce that back to a healthy lateral okay and so long term you know like two to three years from now um You might want it back a little bit further because also we want to think about the height of the tree for picking fruit and especially the height of the and which is not tall well and also the less time you can spend on the ladder the better my dad actually fell off a ladder picking apples this past summer and dealt with a fractured back for three months yeah gosh so ladder's bad cut your fruit trees low this is my uh philosophy now great um just go to town on it man okay all right so with these long overextended branches and if I'm working on the ground if you just go and start making a cut lots of times it can be too heavy and kind of that concept of why they break in the first place all that leverage at the end will go and you'll lose control and it'll end up peeling down and cause a lot of damage for the tree and it looks really bad as well so like it'll pull the bark and basically then that'll be unprotected yeah exactly it looks bad it's unprotected so what you can do is called the three cut method so you make one undercut and sometimes you can get the saw pinch to that point so you just don't want to dip too deep then you do an over cut watch out fall on you there goes a whole peach tree okay and so then you're left with a stub but you can just cut that stub off and that way it doesn't end up peeling and this is right where I always cut myself with these freaking saws hence the glove hence the glove but also changing your hand is so you don't get cut by the saws simple it's simple man this is like a whole peach tree so goodbye I guess we're gonna be merciless all right it's the same thing I'll demo again do your undercut and then for the top cut the literature says to go past your bottom cut but you can also you can go on either side and it doesn't really make a difference a lot of times I'll go under um and it still snaps off goodbye peach tree and then change where your hand is so you don't cut yourself with a saw there we go and finish off the stub and so for this one here trying to decide just go ahead and take it here see how that peeled so I'm actually going to do my final cut here but that's an illustration of what happens if you don't do that three cut method and sometimes that can travel all the way down a branch I've had it some things peel like up to eight to ten feet yeah and that's a good way to make a client angry uh I guess I'll give my jerk goat some of these leaves to chew on oh no a piece okay everything's fine all right you little jerks here enjoy he's actually it's looking way more balanced already but I mean it looks a little like heavy on that side still probably yeah yeah yes I think probably need to take some of the ends off of those branches growing over the fence also there's some of those branches kind of on the fence that are rubbing yeah um it's up to you whether you like the goats playing with those or if you want to raise them off no we might as well raise it off actually the only reason I left them is because I we would do more trimming and I was like well they're going to try to get it anyway these are sacrificed limbs those that's like watching Jurassic Park they're like vicious all right so the tree's starting to look more balanced we have to take some of those low Limbs and some of those long limbs off but unlike the trees we did previously there's not really any branches that could serve as a candidate for a central lead yeah the structure of the trees kind of set so at this point it's mitigating that kind of lever arm effect that these fruit trees tend to get because again they're always just going to grow towards the light like up and out so it's just a matter of bringing them down you know to a normal level to a normal level and also trying to get the branches so that they have an even Branch spacing all the way down the branch yeah that makes sense um you know something like in Bonsai they call that ramification stuff so essentially you're just trying to establish make it so all these smaller branches down the branch have opportunities to grow bigger sure and what that does is it distributes the weight more evenly so it doesn't have that same lever arm effect and also like in wind storms and things like that all those branches move that slightly different ways as the wind hits it and that dampens the effect down the branch so that essentially like it's a Windbreak it's a wind like a natural wind break what you don't want to do and what you see people do oftentimes is they'll go down a branch and you know trying to thin the tree out because lots of people you know thin trees thin fruit trees guilty that is an important thing like we talked about with some of the other trees is getting those interior Crossing branches taken care of but they'll go through the interior or take all the little and just take all the little branches that's how I trimmed this tree last year no one tell anyone and that's called lion tailing and what that does is it makes all the weight at the end of the branch so that when the wind hits it it's all hitting that end and it's all you know know all the force is getting applied to these unions that are potentially already kind of weak so we hear a lot about thinning fruit trees and that leads to the biggest mistake most novice fruit tree owners have and that is taking off too many branches resulting in line tailing which ultimately leads to the collapse of those branches when they're full of fruit so if you look here there's a lot of these branches growing up this lateral branch and over time if we allow those to grow more we'll have fruit that is easy to reach and will also have branches that are structurally stronger because as those evenly spaced branches Blow In The Wind they move at different rates and it dampens the effect of strong winds and it also allows the branches to hold more fruit without splitting or breaking shall we keep cutting yes so especially this Branch right here is resting on the fence so I could probably just go ahead and cut it from the top but with bigger branches it's always just good habit to make a little cut on the bottom a little stopper cut and finish on the top and then clean that stub off you know as I'm watching those goats eat that I actually just remembered something about stone fruit leaves and not wanting to give it to animals so I'm just quickly going to Google can goats eat peach tree leaves yeah so they can be highly toxic and here's an interesting thing is actually so the a lot of stone fruit leaves have cyanide in them so we don't want to let them eat very much of it but an interesting thing is that when animals have plenty of forage and plenty of feed they won't be very likely to eat too much of anything that is actually harmful to them obviously we don't want to make it too easy for them so I'm going to go take those away but you know sometimes these animals will actually use the leaves of plants that have you know potentially toxic harmful things in them to help manage their inside parasite loads so that's actually why we plant cedar trees out in the pasture so that they can rub the oils on themselves it helps mitigate with flies and other bugs and walnut leaves are another thing that's highly toxic but it's actually something we intentionally have where they can browse to help them manage their internal parasites as well so I'm not that worried because they're already full and they're basically just playing but we're going to take them away anyway I hope that learning how to take care of your fruit trees has inspired you to plant some of your own and if you're looking for resources for how to do that you can check them out on my Squarespace website Daniel and I are working on an entire series starting with planting your tree to caring for your tree to how to use a chainsaw how to maintain your chainsaw and then what do we do with the wood once we actually have to trim and take down our trees 20 30 40 years down the road I hope you stay tuned for all of that and if you are looking for resources to plant trees of your own take care of them check out my Squarespace website I have been blogging there for 12 years since the very beginning when I was a city slicker who had no idea what I was doing to now when I'm still learning every day but it's all been documented and you can check it out Anne of alltrades.com Squarespace has been a fantastic resource for me someone who is not super tech savvy to be able to easily drag and drop whatever I want to share with the world into a beautiful artist design template and then share it with the world on Squarespace I'm able to host my own online store photo gallery 12 years worth of articles about woodworking homesteading animal rearing and everything in between if you're looking to start a website of your own check out Squarespace and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com animal trades for a 10 discount happy planting cheers

Channel: Anne of All Trades

Views: 2,934,669

Keywords: anne of all trades, fruit trees, gardening, garden, tree trimming, tree maintenance tips, gardening tips, apple tree, plum tree, peach tree

Id: h6hWa3nx7yo

Length: 35min 45sec (2145 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023