Prune apple trees every Spring for their good health and longevity.
Pruning apple and crab apple trees each Spring is essential to ensure a healthy, long lived tree. Left unpruned, these beautiful trees quickly sprout sucker branches and lose their shape.
We want to limit up-rights (slender branches growing perpendicular from a main limb) to encourage strong, healthy limbs. Eliminating or reducing crossing limbs helps minimize damage from wind and severe weather. It promotes good air circulation among leaves and branches, essential for a healthy tree. Dead wood is cut out. Dead, rotting limbs can harbor disease and harmful insects. Last but not least, pruning creates or will help maintain a uniform, aesthetically pleasing shape.
Pruning an upright.
With both apples and crab apples, new growth is encouraged to spread outward, not upward. Even the smallest of apple and crabs need to be pruned early to ensure they grow in a strong and not crowded shape. If you have an older apple or crab, only prune about twenty-five percent of the tree so as not to harm these iconic trees that are such a treasured part of our Upper Valley landscape.
Pruning should take place early March to about mid-April, before the trees come out of dormancy.
