It is generally advised to prune fruit trees in late winter. However, it can make sense to use pruning shears in summer, especially for young trees and those that have already developed little fruit due to aging. Such pruning promotes the development of fruit wood and thus also the development.
Why and how do you carry out a summer fruit tree pruning?
A fruit tree summer pruning is useful to promote fruit wood development and achieve a loose crown shape. Prune herbaceous shoots to 3-4 leaves, shorten excess shoots and only cut woody shoots in winter.
Why does a summer cut make sense?
In addition to the fruit wood, numerous woody shoots develop along the annual branch extensions, i.e. the shoots that emerged last year. They also need to be converted into short fruiting wood to create the desired, loose crown shape. Young fruit trees in particular during the training phase benefit from such pruning.
How to do a summer pruning
To do this, remove the tips from the young, still green woody shoots as soon as they have become around 20 centimeters long. To do this, pinch the shoot tips back to around three to four well-developed leaves, although you should not remove them directly on the leaf. Instead, it is better to place the knife or scissors slightly above it. The tree reacts to this first de-sharpening by forming strong woody shoots again: new ones develop from the first one to three eyes of the de-sharpened shoots. However, you should only ever leave one, otherwise the fruit wood would be too dense. The excess shoots are cut away and the remaining ones are shortened to two leaves. You should also shorten woody shoots that emerge from perennial fruit wood during early summer.
Attention: Only herbaceous, young shoots can be converted into fruit wood
When trimming, you should only select herbaceous, slightly woody shoots with a maximum length of 20 to 25 centimeters. Only these can be converted into fruit wood.
This remains to be done during subsequent winter pruning
Once the summer cut has been completed, there is not much left to do next winter. Now leave the short fruit wood untouched. However, if woody shoots have developed from the fruit wood, these are removed during the vegetation break except for the lowest one and this in turn is shortened to two eyes. If the fruit wood on older fruit trees is too dense, it is thinned out with scissors. Cut so that the remaining fruit wood gets enough light.
Tip
Even if you want to keep your fruit tree small, you should prune it in summer. While winter pruning stimulates growth, trees pruned in summer grow in size and girth much more slowly.
