February is a great month for a winter Prune. How not to kill your tree, and ensure a better harvest. I talk about the difference between a summer prune and a winter prune. I also have 2 different nectarine trees, one that was planted just 2 years ago and is in great shape and one that is quite old and is in terrible condition.

00:00 Pruning a new fruit tree
01:02 Old tree - the danger of not pruning
03:14 2 pruning shapes A vs V
04:00 Best time of year to prune
04:51 How to prune - in stages
09:04 Pruning a tree in bad condition.
12:21 Pruning a tree in its first year.
13:10 Pruning into a V shape


I like to prune most of my trees in a V shape or a goblet. I have space all my trees fairly close together so I will end up with lots of small fruit trees. I Prune mainly in the winter, with a small tidy up in the summer. February is a great month to prune trees in the norther hemisphere as that is when the tree is dormant, and February is also a great month to summer prune a tree in the southern hemisphere (once the fruit has gone).

In the winter a tree has a huge amount of potential stored up and is about to go into spring. When pruning in the winter I think about where the tree is likely to grow in response to the pruning cuts I make. In the summer pruning is different, the tree has already used up all its energy bearing fruit and so it won't grow much if at all in response to the cuts. This can be used to your advantage by tidying up parts of the tree that you don''t actually want more growth. For example, getting rid of water sprout (shoots that grow vertically and won't bear fruit).

Here I am pruning nectarine trees in NZ, but I use the same method for pretty much all the trees, with the exception of a small apple tree which is on an M9 root stock as so will grow quite small and I am happy to leave that in more of an A shape or Christmas tree shape.