Garden Centre

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Pruning Peach Trees

Well, it’s something that you don’t really want to have to do – you want your peach trees to have been beautifully maintained like filigree jewellery, to be productive and lovely. Sadly that’s not always the case – neglect, ignorance or winter storms can all leave you with an overgrown and underproducing tree.

Here’s what you do:

Begin my removing any broken or diseased limbs and then take out any branches that are downward facing. The ideal peach tree has what’s called an open centre, so you should think about cutting away any strong upright shoots developing on the inside of the tree, leaving smaller shoots for fruit production and keeping outside shoots for growth.

You can also cut out branches or twigs that will bear poor quality fruit such as shoots that are less than the diameter of your little finger, branches that point downwards or are shaded.

Good growth is about the diameter of a pencil and a foot to eighteen inches in length – if it is more than two feet long, you should cut back one-third of the length.

That should get you back to a reasonable tree, and then, annually, you simply repeat the process, trying not to cut back wood that will fruit well, and keeping all pruning to the absolute minimum that will open up the tree to allow sunlight to get to its entirety and to give air movement for pollination.

Peach tree courtesy of runder

Labels: fruit tree pruning, pruning peach tree

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:40 AM

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