Your Complete Guide To Pruning Apple Trees

If you’re growing one or more apple trees in your garden, you’ll want to know how to correctly prune your trees to get the most fruit and to keep your trees nice and healthy.

For those who feel a little daunted by how to prune an apple tree, here is a complete beginner's guide to pruning apple trees.

The importance of pruning your apple tree

It’s important to prune your apple tree for a number of reasons. Proper pruning gives you a chance to create a nicely shaped tree and makes it easy to harvest your apples once they’re ready.

If you follow the correct procedure, you’ll end up with a perfectly pruned apple tree that produces plenty of fruit and remains healthy, vigorous and disease free.

When to prune apple trees in the UK

When is the best time to prune apple trees? The best time to prune apple trees in the UK is in winter when they’re dormant. Winter pruning season is generally from late November through until late February. At this time of the year, your tree will have no foliage as apple trees are deciduous and drop their leaves during dormancy.

How to prune apple trees

Pruning should be carried out once a year, and this shouldn’t be a difficult task if you follow these simple steps.

Here’s a video to show you how it’s done.

Step 1 - Gather your tools

To prune your apple tree effectively, you’ll need the following tools:

• A sturdy ladder so that you can reach all areas of the tree without overreaching
• Leather gloves or similar
• Safety glasses
• Pair of sterilised secateurs for smaller branches
• A sharp and clean pruning saw

Step 2 - Remove any dead or diseased branches

To start your pruning, you want to remove any dead, damaged or diseased branches. This will give your tree a nice clean look, prevent further disease and will often help to open up the interior of the tree.

Step 3 - Trim back or remove any crisscrossing branches

This is the time that you want to step back and take a good look at your tree. You ultimately want to achieve a nicely shaped tree with an open centre. This means you don’t want the tree's interior to be too crowded.

If there are any crisscrossing branches, you want to trim these back or even remove some of them altogether if the inside of your tree is really crowded. This can happen if a tree has been neglected for some time or is a badly pruned apple tree.

Branches that cross over each other can result in the bark rubbing. You want to avoid this because it not only causes damage to the tree but can also become a target spot for pests and diseases to enter the tree.

Step 4 - Identify what type of fruiting tree you have

Two types of apple trees are commonly grown. There are spur-bearing varieties and also tip-bearing varieties. Most varieties are spur-bearing. However, varieties such as Granny Smith, Bramley, and Discovery apples are tip-bearing.

To explain this further, spur-bearing trees will develop fruit along the lengths of the branches, while tip-bearing trees will only develop fruit at the ends or tips of branches.

This means that you need to be careful when pruning tip-bearing apple trees so that you don’t remove too many tips and, thus, reduce your fruit production.

Step 5 - Identify fruit-bearing buds and leaf-bearing buds

What you want to achieve with your pruning is to keep as many fruit-bearing buds as possible and reduce some of the new leaf growth. This allows the tree to eventually put more energy into growing fruit rather than leaves or foliage.

Here’s how to tell the difference between the two types of buds:

• Leaf-bearing buds are flat and scale-like.
• Fruit-bearing buds are more rounded and furry, with very short stems or spurs.

Step 6 - Cut back strong leading branches to half their length

Any strong leading branches growing outside the canopy of the tree's general shape, including those at the top, can be cut back by about half their length.

When you do this, make sure that you’re not sacrificing all of the fruiting buds.

Step 7 - Cut back the other branches to around one-third of their length

Once again, you want to ensure that you’re not cutting off too many of the fruiting buds, but you just want to trim back the branches to keep the lovely shape of the canopy.

When making pruning cuts, do them at a 45-degree angle, cutting just above an outward-facing bud. If you don’t do this and just leave a section of bare stem, this will cause dieback of the stem, which is not attractive.

Tips for pruning apple trees

Here are some general apple tree pruning tips that you should remember.

1. Don’t prune a very young tree

It’s important to avoid pruning your apple tree until it is at least one year old. This means the roots have had enough time to fully establish themselves in the soil after planting. It’s also best to avoid summer pruning apple trees as the trees will be in active growth and producing fruit.

However, pruning apple trees in summer is possible to just reduce some of the more vigorous growth.

2. Avoid apple tree pruning in freezing weather

When pruning apple trees in winter, it’s important not to prune your tree in freezing weather or if there is a danger of frost for around 48 hours after pruning. When you prune, you produce open cuts that can easily be damaged by frost. That’s why some experienced gardeners finish pruning apple trees in spring.

3. Don’t over-prune your apple tree

Generally speaking, you only want to remove around ten to twenty per cent of the overall growth of the tree. Therefore, avoid over-pruning even if you’re pruning old apple trees that have been neglected for some time. Renovation pruning can be spread over several winters to avoid shocking the tree into excessive regrowth.

4. Can you kill an apple tree by over-pruning?

If you over-prune an apple tree, you can actually kill the tree. You should remove, at most, around 20 percent of the canopy.

5. Avoid removing all the young wood

You’ll find that your tree will fruit best on wood that is around 1 to 4 years old, so at apple tree pruning time, never remove all of the young wood from your tree. Just trim this back to a growth bud to maintain the overall shape of the tree.

6. Don’t prune all the branches on a tip-bearing tree

You want to avoid trimming all the branches if you have a tip-bearing tree because you’ll end up with no fruit. For these types of trees, you just want to cut back those branches that are growing too long and escaping the general canopy of the tree.

Problem-solving when pruning apple trees

When it comes to pruning apple trees, you might encounter a few problems. Here’s how to fix them.

Problem 1 - Lichen

This appears as grey or green crusty growth on the branches. It’s completely harmless and nothing to worry about.

Problem 2 - Apple Canker

This appears as dark and flaky shrunken patches on the branches. It’s best to remove these branches as they’re diseased.

Key takeaways

You now should have a clear idea of how to correctly prune an apple tree by using our apple pruning guide. In essence, the pruning will stimulate productive new growth and help maintain your tree's shape and size.

Most importantly, you need to understand what type of tree you have and how to avoid removing the fruiting buds from the tree while still keeping it nice and healthy.

If you don’t already have an apple tree in your garden or want to add to your collection, have a look at the wide variety of Ashridge’s apple trees that you’ll enjoy growing.