IT'S TIME FOR SOME PRUDENT PRUNING

Make sure you have your secateurs at hand, says David Patch, as your fruit trees may need some close attention this month

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Summer pruning is often overlooked – after all, it’s a time of year when there are many more exciting tasks in the fruit garden. However, there are several reasons why we should keep our secateurs handy all through the long summer months and prune top fruit trees to ensure healthy trees and bigger crops to come.

Before the 1890s, summer pruning of fruit trees was unheard of. All pruning was carried out in the winter months. However, around 1898 a young man called Louis Lorette noticed that trained trees that had been pruned each winter produced a lot less fruit than standard trees that had been left unpruned. He started a series of experiments at the Practical School of Agriculture in Wagonville, France, and proved that apple and pear tree buds formed at the base of a branch are more productive than those formed further up the branch. He wrote an article for the French gardening magazine Jardinage in 1912, describing his new method, which did away with winter pruning and instead relied on pruning every 30 days from the middle of June onwards.

The general idea behind this radical new approach was that it encouraged the dormant buds at the base of branches to quickly form fruiting spurs. Traditional winter pruning was shown to encourage growth at the expense of fruit – great in the early years when the goal is to establish a good branch framework but not so good once the tree had become established.

INCREASING YIELDS BUT LIMITING GROWTH