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#1 Get your bearings
With more established apple trees, there’s more to take in. Give yourself enough time to fully assess the tree:
- Is it overgrown and needs a significant amount taken out to open up the tree?
- Was it well-pruned last year, and only needs some touch-ups after the previous season’s growth?
- Can you identify a primary scaffold?
- If not, can you identify busy areas where you may want to take out a larger branch to support branches that seem more necessary?
- Which branches are growing well (at a 60 degree angle from the trunk, without any sharp turns from damage or previous cuts, etc.)?
- Can you see any dead wood, diseased wood, or otherwise undesirable branches?
Once you’ve gotten a sense of the tree, you probably know where you want to start.
#2 Make your biggest cuts first
This makes sense as a time saver – don’t spend ten minutes clearing watersprouts and pendants off a branch and then decide to lop off the whole thing. It also makes sense from a structural perspective. When you understand the tree’s form: its strengths and less desirable areas, you get a sense of where it might benefit from more light. You’re also guiding the tree towards its future growth. With more established trees, we start to take into account the limbs that are aging out of production and the younger wood emerging to take its place .
Your first and biggest cuts should focus on
- Lining up replacement wood for branches that are done producing – this may be encouraging or making space for a younger branch on an older limb, or removing an older limb to make space for current buds with potential
- Removing surplus scaffold limbs
- Taking out weak limbs (undesirable angles, zig-zagging wood that leaves the tree with weak joints)
#3 Go back through with loppers and hand pruners to make refining cuts
Open up the internal parts of the tree by:
- Dialing back old spurs, watersprouts, and any branches growing straight up or down
- Remove crisscrossing or rubbing branches
- Tip and invigorate your branches
In the upper left-hand corner, a particularly big branch growing upright and back towards the central leader, thereby blocking inner growth from sunlight. This branch is being removed in the upper left picture. In the picture below, it has been removed. Note how much more open and balanced the tree appears.
#4 Remove competition around the central leader
Whittle back the treetop mass into a spindly christmas tree form – a singled out central leader with an auxiliary branches either clipped out (if it's especially busy up top) or clipped back to not block the leader from sunlight.
 This is also a time when you’ll want to consider tree height. Depending on the variety, the ideal tree height fluctuates around 18 feet. You’ll be working down any unnecessary height that the tree accumulates. As a rough (and largely tongue-in-cheek) guesstimate of your trees’ ideal height, line up your tallest ladder, climb as high on it as you feel safe going, and aim to remove anything above what your arms can’t reach from that point. In other words: keep your trees to a height that is manageable for you, the grower.
For more about pruning, sign up for our webinar series, upcoming workshops and events, and check out the Holistic Orchard Network -- a forum for problem solving and experience sharing between holistic apple growers.
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