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nafex - [NAFEX] Summer Pruning

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  • From: Scott Smith <scott@cs.jhu.edu>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Summer Pruning
  • Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:26:07 -0400

I have also been learning how to summer prune in the last few years, and have made a lot of mistakes. I planted trees very closely (e.g. full-sized apricots, plums, peaches, and pears at 2-3') and so I *really* need to summer prune! I never tie down limbs, no time to do that on all the trees I have. In the summer I primarily hedge back -- I have some battery-operated hedge trimmers and I can hedge my 400 trees in one hour. I do this around three times in the summer. My goal in hedging is not to take off 1/3 the new growth, but to take it back to about 6"-1' of new growth. My plums have already put on some 2-3' shoots up top this time of year, and taking off just 1/3 is not going to do much. If it is looking too "dark" inside the tree I also do thinning cuts - take out a big long limb. I also look at the spacing between the larger limbs. At something like 2-3' above a joint I like to see the limbs 1' apart, and higher up I like to see the limbs 2-3' apart. It took me some time to get this correct balance in my head, but now I have it and I just remove until that proper level is achieved.

I have the same problem with the multiple shoots. In the winter is when I thin those guys back, if four came out I pick one or maybe two to keep. I also do a lot of more major thinning in the winter so many of these multi-shoot clusters are removed completely. I have been trying to transition to do more summer thinning -- when the leaves are on I can see better where to thin (look for the too-dark interior) and also there is less strong a flush of new growth than with winter thinning.

Your Toka plum sounds like my Howard Miracle plum. It produces millions of tiny shoots from everywhere. It has been one of my hardest trees to prune, and very prone to diseases partly because of the subsequent lack of air circulation. I believe the way to prune such a tree is to have extremely wide spacing on the major limbs to compensate for the large density of shoots, and to thin out the shoots as best as you can.

Scott




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