With winter comes the job of pruning apples to maintain trees’ health and maximise the harvest. John Easton, a fruit specialist at Brogdale in Kent, offers his expert advice on how to prune trees to ensure abundant apple crops for many years to come
“ People ask me why I haven’t written a pruning book, and the answer is because each tree is different,” explains veteran fruit-tree specialist John Easton, who has been with Brogdale, the home of the National Fruit Collection in Kent, since 1968. “Some books are very good, but the difficulty is that you’ll never get a tree so well-behaved that it looks like it does in print.” This is perhaps a little unedifying if you are faced with an apple tree you feel you ought to prune before spring arrives, but John can still offer sound advice to get you started.
His first instruction is that you must learn the character of your tree. If your tree is not self-seeded, it’s likely to have been grafted onto a rootstock when it was propagated in the nursery. The abiding character of any tree is strongly influenced by its rootstock. The more vigorous the rootstock, the more inherently vigorous the tree will be. If a tree is simply too large for its location, you may find it better to start again with a tree grafted onto a smaller rootstock, and vice versa. For example, rootstocks M9, M27 and M26 produce dwarf to semi-dwarf trees, with M26 topping out at 3m in height. Larger trees are likely to be grafted onto M106, M111 or M25, the last of which will grow into a tree reaching around 5m in height.
“If you’ve a bulge where the rootstock and the variety join, you’ll have a dwarf rootstock. If there’s no bulge but a different, darker colour, anything from 15cm to 30cm from the ground, it’s likely that it’s a semi-vigorous or vigorous rootstock. If the tree is very large, it’s either been let go or it might have been pruned very hard to contain it and then it has been let go because the growth has increased. One of the disasters you see is when someone has tried to contain a tree by cutting back the branches too hard and the tree has stiffened,” says John.
The Trick
Generally, standalone trees, which might have been supported by a stake when young, and are always staked if dwarfing, are pruned into an open-centred goblet shape. This results in
