How to Prune Plum Trees
Hi! It’s the first of May today is a very special day and just a quick look at some of those plums. This is a variety of plum called Mary Weather damson. It is mainly used for cooking. You can make some very good wine out of it and Julia has been pruning this today. So this tree is a little bit thick. It’s a little bit over grown.
Now plums suffer from a number of fungal diseases which can get into them twice if you prune them over the winter. So plums should be pruned in the spring. And you can see it has been neglect here. There’s some suckers that’s growing up from the roots so that will be removed to some down there and just generally either trees sort of somewhere over grown. This is just next of other pair orchard I’ve mentioned in the past histories, a little over grown. This one is very badly over grown. I don’t make any excuses; I’m just so in the reality as I’m bit of too busy lately but it’s just got a lot of work done. But these are the trees I’m usually working on this and I’m pruning them earlier. You can see the difference.
And it is very much similar sort of approach to what we’ve take with the apples I’ve showed quite often. There’s a pruning cut has been made. There’s another pruning cut central. That’s another couple of cuts that Julia has made. It’s a little higher than I would have done, I made it one or two millimeters out but—we don’t tend to go snipping a lot but just generally fitting them out, taking out the excessive the branches. Here’s the sort of the piles of pruning root that we’ve removing and shifting away and Julia is making them up. You can see basically these are trees that have been pruned and the principles are really quite similar to the apples but the key thing is that we prune the plums in spring not in the winter. We pruned them and you can see why I’m doing it. But what’s been done here just you know cuts, clean cuts taken out. These are quite close another, millimeter out just about right.
And here, we’ve got a main trunk and this is a sort of auxiliary trunk coming out about a foot high above the ground and coming out quite wide. Maybe that’s not brilliant angle but in the context of this tree, you know, it seems to work okay. So again, pruning of plums is something that you do in the spring. Once the growth is well established because that really hay a lot quicker and it is a better of pruning them. And the principles similar as the apple, I’ve gone over them time and time again. By removing the dead to disease to crossing the overcrowded wood and generally leave the trees alone. And here is my espalier and I’ll do a short video about them later.
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