3 Reasons to Prune Your Fruit Trees in Summer

Growing fruit trees can sometimes be a little bit scary because they're just growing on way longer timescales. And if you make a mistake growing them, well, you're going to pay for that for many years to come. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it is my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. I have this royal apricot tree here. This tree is the only producing stone fruit tree that was here on my property when I first moved in. So it's something I'm actually getting fruit off. There's fruit on it right now, but I'm still holding some pruning shears. And I'm going to cut it. Why would I do that? Why am I insane? Well, it's because you're going to do some summer pruning when it comes to your fruit trees, especially if you're growing in a small space. So in this video, we're going to talk about why you should be summer pruning a lot of your fruit trees, especially if you don't want these massive sprawling trees or you don't have a lot of space. We're going to prune a huge loquat tree. We're even going to do something that's maybe unthinkable and remove fruit from some citrus trees in the hedge. So cultivate that Like button. And I will bless you with my personal emotional support as you come through and do the unthinkable. Clip off plant tissue on a fruit tree while it's fruiting in the summer. So like I said, we're going to start over here with this royal apricot. I would say this is about my wingspan wide, which is maybe six foot four or so. And it's just a hair shorter than me. I'm six foot four. It's probably around five foot 11 or five eight or so. I don't want this plant to get too much taller than me. Maybe seven foot or so. Cause it is right up next to some beds that I built. So when you're pruning, especially in the summer, especially when you're actively pruning, you have to think about what you actually want as the gardener. So if I wanted to, I could come through and see this new growth that's just been shooting out. I could clip this down about three inches. You don't necessarily want to come through and just completely shred off everything. But on this one right here, this is a new shoot coming out. It's not doing a whole lot for the plant. I can come out and just snip about three inches off and I've just tipped it off for the season. And contrary to what you might think, when you're pruning, you're actually encouraging new growth. So as far as timing when you're doing this, you want to make sure you're summer pruning in anywhere from late June to early August. But if you miss the window, it's just not a good idea. You want to prune when the plant is actually actively growing and putting out fruit, which I'll show you right here. So as you can see, I've got little clusters of fruit hanging out all around the plant. And I would say maybe 20-25 apricots on this. We've got a little issue here, but that's no big deal. It's totally fine to prune while fruit's hanging. Before we keep on pruning for shape, let's talk a little bit about some of the more classic pruning situations like dead, diseased, damaged tissue, crossing branches. Before this plant started to throw out leaves for the season, I actually did that in the dormant season. So, you know, let's say this was damaged, I would have cut it off. If something was crossing through the canopy, I would have cut it off. But obviously a lot of new growth has happened. So I can do a quick scan on this plant and see if I see any tissue that is really not productive. So for example, it's hard to see, but there's just a little nub right here that's dead and it's not doing much. We can take that off. We can take this one off right here. And I'm going to keep on going through this and then we'll talk about the summer prune. So if you notice here, the trunk of the plant is directly this way. So this is one low branch that's been shooting off. We obviously have an apricot right here. It looks really good actually. But take a look down here. What's this going to do for the plant in the longterm? Not too much. It's a low-lying offshoot from an already low-lying branch going directly into the ground. So there's not really a point to having that on the plant right now. It's just going to sort of take a little bit more energy than it's using. And then this is coming out way too far randomly low on the plant. So I've got these other low-liers here that I could take off and feel absolutely no remorse for. But then look at how many random offshoots are coming off here. So I'm actually going to tip this back off to maybe here or so to control the canopy. Maybe I'll go to about there. And we'll do some tipping here too just to control this low growth that's not going to do a whole lot. And it's going to bush way out further than I want this plant to be. I've cleaned up a little bit of the low-lying branches, some of the dead disease stuff, some of the crossing stuff. Right now I'm just going to go through and prune the whole canopy to roughly six foot around and around this tall. So now it's just mostly a shaping thing. So here is a dead branch that I just missed. So this is completely nonproductive. So this has to go. So I think I've got an okay overall shape. It's still a little bit wonky, but right now what I'm going to do is try to take out any of these little sprouts that are coming up and cluttering up the interior of the canopy, just so we get a little more airflow. So that's all I really want to do on this apricot tree. I've taken off this much of the plant. So not even a third. When you're summer pruning, you don't want to follow the classic rules where you can cut a plant down two thirds at most. You really want to take off only what's necessary. The one big move I made is I took off this branch on the inside. It was like semi-crossing through the canopy, kind of getting tangled up. I think it was the right move. It does introduce sort of a funky looking hole right in the middle, but I don't think that's a big deal, especially because like we said, pruning will encourage more growth. So this should fill in again and be really nice. But that's really all you want to do. Prune it for shape, take all the diseased stuff out. Now we have to go to the huge tree in my front yard, the loquat to do a massive pruning job. Out here in the front yard, the loquat tree, actually two trees in this same hole, have absolutely exploded this year. I've been eating loquat, I don't know, 20 a day for like a couple months now. And I still couldn't even get close to coming through all the fruit that was coming off this tree. But you know, this is a big fruit tree that's done with its fruiting cycle for the year. It's kind of a weird one because it'll flower in the fall and it'll fruit in the spring into the very early summer. But right now what looks like a full tree with fruit hanging on it, all these fruit are actually shriveled and they are not good for eating anymore. And so it is time to actually prune this. And we're going to go very aggressive on this loquat starting with the under canopy. So let's take a look underneath this tree and you can see what I mean. There's a quite a large canopy on a loquat where anything inside here that's producing just probably should be removed. So I'm talking about something like this that is, you know, angling in right towards the center of the plant, something like this. You really can almost hollow this interior out and it does completely fine. So that's what I'm going to start out doing. The under canopy is pruned out. Quite a bit actually got taken off. You can be way more aggressive with a fruit tree after it's fruited for the season. You can go more towards a standard prune. Now I have a lot of plant to take off both around the perimeter, low lying, and also controlling the height of this. Because, I mean, this is already 12 feet tall. I don't really want it much taller than that. So I'm going to have to hop on the ladder, come around with a couple of different tools. By the way, Corona Tools is the sponsor of today's video. So all the tools you see are from them. This one's kind of cool actually. This one I like to come in and just do a little targeted prune. I feel like I'm a sniper here, pruning that off. So I might run around with this, but at this point it's just a big pruning job and I'll narrate a little bit of my thoughts as we do this. So there we have it. The loquat, the double loquat is pruned up. It does have a little bit of a funky vibe, way more manicured. I cut the top down a couple of feet or so. We pruned all the low growth off. So what's going to happen now is it's going to start putting out more leaves. It's going to flower in the fall and that whole process will continue. But this is how you would approach a really, really large tree pruning for shape, size and production. So now I want to take you to some really young citrus and show you something kind of painful to do, but somewhat necessary if you want good fruit. Now I'm over here in my citrus hedge. This is a really young fledgling citrus hedge, but the plants are putting out a lot of growth. So I'm not going to do any sort of summer pruning on these cause they're just still sizing up. They're not even really producing yet. Except for a few of them are and that's what we're talking about over here with these citrus. So down here on this mandarin, this is an Owari Satsuma mandarin and it is a little bit of an odd shape. You can see there's just some funky sort of branching coming off of it. But more importantly, it experienced quite a bit of shock. You can see some new leaves finally starting to come in. The transplant shock was severe on this one and it's already trying to throw out some fruit. In this first year, especially on this plant, I'm going to do the unthinkable and actually remove this fruit. I don't want it. It is going to take way too much energy off of the plant right now. And I'm going to sacrifice this year's fruit in favor of structure and growth and more resources devoted to that so that the resulting years are going to be very productive. Remember, this is going to be a multi, I mean, as long as I'll live here, this tree is going to produce. So it kind of, it's kind of a bummer to do this. But at the same time, you're thinking about the longterm with your fruit trees. And so with citrus, I'm just going to take these off and hope that we get a lot of production next year, a lot of new growth. This is a bear's lime. It's the one that you saw at the beginning. You can see, actually there's a decent amount of fruit on this one as well. Four just right here, a bunch elsewhere. This is a much larger tree. So I'm going to leave a few, but I still will remove some. Cause again, we're still growing these trees up. So I'm going to take these smaller ones off here and not stress about it. If I am really in need of limes, I can get some from a friend for now. And I just want to set my trees up for success, but there's no way I'm going to have absolutely zero on a tree of this size. So I'll leave this guy right here. I'm certainly far from an expert in tree care with the new Epic Homestead. I'm getting a lot of experience putting trees in the ground, managing them. We've got some trees behind me right now that are going to start going into the homestead pretty soon. But really there's a couple of different things that we talked about. Summer pruning your trees for shape and size. I really recommend checking out Dave Wilson's Backyard Orchard Culture for that. That's where I've learned most of this as far as keeping a lot of different fruit trees smaller. So you get a lot of production, but you don't have these sprawling massive trees. So we did it over with the apricots. You can even see the loquat right now. That is trimmed down as much as it really can be. So if you have a really large unruly tree, don't be afraid to get crazy with it. Last season, even on that loquat, I went insane and really pruned it out. And I had the most productive loquat season I've ever, ever had. And then the painful one at the end, on these smaller trees, especially something like these citrus, sacrifice in year one to gain in years two, three, four, five and beyond. I'm not losing that much. I maybe took off 10 fruit across that entire citrus that we're starting to fruit out. Let's get some vegetative growth going. So I have huge ample citrus harvests in the future. So those are three different unique pruning scenarios that hopefully were helpful to you. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.