How to Spur Thin Fruit Trees
Hello, it’s Stephen Hayes of Fruitwise Heritage Apples. I would have to show you again, I’m continuing a sort of tutorials on how to prune apple trees. I just want to show you something about spur pruning. We already heard about how fruit buds are grown normally into your own wood and that’s about it produces fruit year after year, turns it into a spur.
After a period of time, five to 10 years, probably six years maybe longer, the fruit spur system becomes excessively crowded. If there’s too many fruit that’s too close together, always we discussed that’s not a good thing. So just quite briefly, we’re going to show how we deal with overgrown spur systems.
This is an apple tree called Red Pippin that used to be called to be Fiesta when it was first raised in Kent in 1986 but that sounded too far and they changed it to Red Pippin. This is a fruit spur system. You can see there are some buds. That is a nice bud. It’s a nice bud there but this spur system is just too thick so again, we might assemble with radical technique and I’m going to take the system clean out.
In case when you want it done with one snip I have reduced the number of fruit buds here down to three which was about eight, which was too many. Here’s another example of the same. You can see there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine fruit buds here. That is way too many. Again, the lower ones just to clean out. And even here, there’s still too many so I that’s why I—for the very thin pointy nose cutters. I’m just taking carefully few of these out.
So, looking back at that another is not sure and crafted and believe me, that is going to give us a bit a potential for four or five good sized fruits on that little system. If you’ve been left on the tree so that you could have easily have had 15 maybe 20 apples which would have been too small and they wouldn’t have colored up and it could have been quite useless. There’s no point whatsoever growing apples that went to store or market.
Okay, I’ll just give you a picture about the fruit spur thin.
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