Pruning: Different trees require different approaches

See part 1 here

Pruning your fruit trees may seem somewhat daunting. What to cut, what to leave? It can be confusing if you don't understand how and where fruit trees bear fruit.

Pruning long-lived trees to produce high-quality fruit season after season is no easy task.

Training the limbs early to a proven system is the only way to develop a productive tree. Neglected, unpruned trees never produce quality fruit and they break down if they're not pruned correctly.

Pruning is critical. If you aren't willing to prune, don't waste your time planting fruit trees.

Prune during the dormant season, just before active growth begins in the spring. Doing it now helps pruning wounds heal faster. It is also easier to recognize the flower buds and to identify any winter killed branches before leaves are on the tree.

Trees need a strong framework to produce a good, high-quality yield. They need to be able to support heavy crops without damage or breakage.

They must be open enough to allow sunlight, air, and spray material to penetrate for good pest control.

Fruit tree pruning splits into two basic concepts. First, to develop a structurally sound tree that will support itself and second, to produce abundant, high quality fruit each season.

One difficult but important concept escapes most home gardeners. When you bought the tree, you gained legal title to it. That gives you not only the right, but the responsibility, to prune it. Plant it and do nothing and in a few years you have a bushy tree with poor branching, too many limbs and weak branch attachments. The branches shade each other, making small, inferior fruit.

Train new, semi-dwarf apple, pear and sweet cherries to the central leader for maximum strength and for good solar exposure. Grow the "leader" or main trunk without checking its height until the scaffold limbs are established. Develop three tiers of branches on the tree. The first tier starts 30-36 inches off the ground. Subsequent tiers are similarly spaced up the trunk.

Visualize conical shaped trees that, in profile, look like a Christmas tree. Each tier of branches is shorter than the ones below, giving a pyramidal shaped tree. This makes the tree strong and increases the light because the shorter branches do not shade the branches below them.