Page 29 - Simply Vegetables Winter 2022/23

Pruned fan tree
Healing wound
cut all branches back to around 2.5 metres (8ft) from ground level. By cutting back
to this height you will still end up with a tree of some majesty but far more useful for cropping and harvesting. You can, of course, cut back to a lower height or a
not so low height and this is entirely up to you and the tree’s location in your garden. Once you have cut back to the required height shorten all laterals off the branch framework to around 150mm (6 inches). Your trees will now look quite bare but this rejuvenation will quickly inspire the tree to grow plenty of new wood.
There has to be a double health warning here. Firstly, the majority of books and pundits will advise you to heavily prune trees like this over a two or three-year period to stop the tree declining rapidly.
I, personally, have never followed this principle and in the hundreds and hundreds of trees that I have renovated I have never had a failure yet! And in any case most clients of mine don’t want to see a half finished tree let alone pay for two or three visits! The second health warning
is that these trees are likely to go ballistic for the first year or so as they have been reinvigorated so much! The important thing to do is respond by pruning all new growth hard every winter and keeping your new height and removing the hundreds of water shoots that are going to appear.
And the final reason for a winter prune
is c). This is a quite easy operation as it simply involves having a good look through all of the restricted forms of trees that you pruned during the summer i.e., cordons, espaliers, fans and dwarf bush trees, to ensure that you missed nothing during the summer prune. When trees are in full leaf it can be easy to miss the odd lateral that you should have pruned back then. Additionally, you might accidentally have caused some damage whilst picking fruit or the winter birds may have been feeding on hanging fruit and have damaged a lateral or branch by its weight. Winter is the time to rectify all these issues!
Fortunately, there are plenty of winter days which are sunny and warm when you can do your winter pruning but think of poor me and my team pruning all of those big trees in the foulest of weathers! As we only have a short window rain, frost and snow cannot stop us!
Apple after summer and winter pruning
fairly vigorous rootstocks or even their
own roots. Generally, these trees are left to fend for themselves until the time comes that the branches are totally congested leading to branch die off, fruiting becomes less and less and what fruit there may be is quite high up the tree. This is the situation where I usually get called in to advise on! However, it is quite easy to do yourself provided that you have the patience and the wherewithal to dispose of the prunings! You will need to accept that the tree is unlikely to fruit for a couple of years as you will be removing much of the fruiting wood.
What you are looking to achieve here is to get back to a basic tree framework and
bringing the height of the tree right down. The first thing to do is to remove all dead, diseased, and damaged wood, all water shoots (and there are likely to be many!) and cut out wood as required to prevent crossing branches. Once you have done this you will already have taken quite a lot of wood out of the tree. The next thing to do is to clear out the middle of the tree by removing any branches that are growing inwards. These branches are unlikely to produce any fruit and if they do the fruit will never ripen well or colour up. Now decide what height you would like the tree to start growing at again so that you are going to be able to harvest the fruit. I always aim to
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