Help with the Summer Pruning

People are often confused about when and how much to prune their trees in the summer. Prune too much and you can take away too much of the tree canopy when the trunk and branches need it for protection from sunburn. Prune too little and the tree can quickly become overgrown, requiring more severe pruning later on. There are plenty of places to read up on how to prune correctly but I've found that nothing beats seeing it done by a pro, preferably in a hands-on setting. Here's your opportunity to do that--two sets of workshops that will get your summer pruning skills up to snuff (or at least considerably improved).

Ann Ralph, formerly of Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, has four workshops scheduled in back yards around the bay area to show you how to summer-prune your fruit trees. I attended a brief pruning workshop that Ann did at Berkeley Hort a few years back and came away after one hour feeling very confident about pruning my trees. Here are the dates and times:

• Saturday, June 8, Oakland, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
• Sunday, June 9, Berkeley, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
• Saturday, June 22, San Pablo, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
• Sunday, June 23, Kensington, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

For more information about the locations and to register, visit Ann's website at www.littlefruit.tree.com, email her at littlefruittree@gmail.com, or call her at 209-296-5797.

If you've planted a new tree in the last year or two, you're probably aware that correct pruning in these formative years can make the difference between a beautiful, healthy tree at maturity, or a problematic and potentially hazardous eyesore. Learn the ins and outs of the art of young tree pruning from Brian Kempf, the Director of the Urban Tree Foundation. This workshop, sponsored by Canopy of Palo Alto, will include 1.5 hours of classroom training and 2.5 hours of hands-on field training. No experience is required, but if you do have pruning experience, are a landscape professional, or an arborist, great! CEUs will be available for ISA certified arborists and tree workers. The workshop will take place on June 15th, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Nixon Elementary, 1711 Stanford Avenue in Stanford.

The workshop itself is free but they do ask that if you attend the workshop that you commit to volunteering at one of the follow-up volunteer tree care work days where you can practice your new pruning skills on the following dates:

• Saturday, June 22nd 9am-12pm
• Saturday, June 29th 9am-12pm
• Saturday, July 13th 9am-12pm
• Thursday, July 27th, 6pm-8pm

These events will give you hands-on training and provide a service to the community. Pruning shears and gloves will be available, but if you have your own, you should bring them.

To register for the Art of Young Tree Pruning Workshop, click here or email Michael@canopy.org.

If You Don't Know What to Do, Take Something Off

January is pruning season and there are few garden tasks I find more satisfying than pruning. Yet every time I approach pruning, my insecurities kick in. Even after a few years of doing it, I start thinking that I'm going to screw things up.

In order to build up my pruning confidence, I attended a free class in fruit tree pruning this morning at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. It was just an hour long but it was a great refresher. Two staff people covered all the basics about pruning fruit trees and answered lots of questions. In addition, they had a different take on the advantages of summer pruning vs. winter pruning than what I'd been taught. Conventional thinking has been that it is best to do the heavier pruning on deciduous fruit trees in the winter when you can really see the structure clearly and to encourage spring growth. The instructors today, however, suggested that whatever you prune off in the winter will grow back and have to be taken off again in the summer, so you might as well wait and do the major prune in the summer (actually, May or June). Hmmm. I can see their point, but there's something about going at a bare tree when you can really see the branches that is more comforting to me. But the best advice of the whole session was this bit of wisdom: if you don't know what to do, take something off. Trees can survive bad pruning better than they can survive no pruning at all. So, as with so many other things in life, the best thing to do is just get off your ass and do it.

So I did. With freshly sharpened pruners and loppers, I started on my two young apple trees that I'm shaping into an informal espalier. Because they're still young, they needed only a few cuts. Same with the fig tree I have in a large oak barrel. The real challenge was the weeping Santa Rosa plum, which I went at with total enthusiasm. I took off the very top branches that had started to shoot straight up in order to keep a nice rounded shape and to keep the height under 8 feet. By this point I had my pruning mojo back and was really enjoying myself. I moved on to the Ranier cherry tree, which has been struggling the last couple years. I pruned off the leader to bring the height down a bit, and trimmed up most of the branches to encourage lots of new growth. Last, I did some shaping on the flowering cherry, taking out some crossing branches and opening up the center a bit. All of that pruning took only about an hour and it felt great.

If you'd like some guidance on winter pruning, you might want to check out Berkeley Hort's upcoming classes. Next Saturday (Jan. 22) they're covering rose pruning at 10:30 a.m. and they'll repeat the fruit tree pruning session on Saturday, Jan. 29 at 10:30 a.m. Get there early because seating is limited and it was packed today. Also, ask about a 10% discount on your purchases that day for anyone attending the class.


Tweet