Teaching Others How To Prune Fruit Trees - It's An Art

When you drive up to my house currently, this is the view. 

The fruit trees are in bloom and since I prune them in the fall, they look beautiful in the spring. The better part is, I don't have to prune when they are flowering as I used to have to fight bees on the blossoms and would knock off potential fruit. I learned many years ago that fall pruning works best for me as the trees look good all winter. 

This past Saturday, I got a call from my friends mother asking if I wanted to earn some money pruning her five fruit trees. I shared with her that I fell a few months back and have a pinched nerve in my right arm and I still have the trees in my back yard I didn't finish this fall to prune and I didn't feel I would have the time, energy, or ability to prune five mature trees that haven't been pruned regularly. 

I did tell her I would be willing to come show her how I would do it and give her advice on pruning them. She said she would like that. So, I packed up my tools and headed to her home. I told her it is hard to hire someone to do your trees as each person has different things that they want from the tree. 

If you want low fruit looking like a bush, the lower tree works. Most of the trees she had looked more like big bushes and because it is near their trailer parking pad, the trees had become a bit lopsided having that side of the trees pruned more than the yard side. 

On some trees, she didn't mind having a lower base "bowl" as she wanted more fruit etc. For the most part, she wanted a tree look with fruit over head but didn't want to use a ladder. I told her how I would do it and then ended up pruning four and part of the fifth tree for her. I thought I would be "ok" doing it since the trees were smaller than I thought, but my arm hasn't been the same since I pruned them. 


The pinched nerve has got my right arm a bit swollen and numb somewhat so it wasn't the smartest thing I did, but she did pay me. I  normally wouldn't take pay for helping someone, but felt like I should take whatever she felt fair in offering. Also, things are tight and it allowed me to pay someone to aerate and thatch my yard which it needed, so it was a good thing. 

You can see the above tree looking more like a bush and now at the right, it looks more like a tree and will fill out as she trains it by pruning it how she wants it. The last tree pictured below, I cut out the center branch and left the last few small branches for her to finish as I thought she had gotten the hang of which to cut off. She has since texted me several times thanking me as her trees look so good now. It is weird that none of hers were in bloom but lives a bit away from me, so we pruned just at the right time. 

I have several posts on pruning. Here is a link to the first where I describe how I prune them flat on the top. 
Here is one where you can see me in the tree using the hedger.  
Here is a link to one where I made a video.