pruning stone fruit trees

The differences

There are already differences between the species of stone trees, cherry trees, apricot peach trees, plum trees or almond trees, but also real differences in growth with pome trees.

If pome trees sometimes have crowned branches, that is to say terminated for a flower eye, in stone trees all are terminated by a wood eye.
This is due to the fact that in the “glitches” there is always the possibility of a dormant eye*. So it will always be necessary to make sure in the “stones” that the size of the twig is done well on a wood eye otherwise the twig is very likely to dry out.

Trees with stones are generally more greedy in light than “pips”, so they will rather be formed in goblets on three main branches.

Trees with pits do not support training in trellised forms (palmettes) quite badly. We then make palmettes “à la diable”.

But we sometimes heard that stone trees, apart from peach trees, did not prune. What about?

All fruit trees can be pruned and sometimes it is a necessity but their reaction to pruning is different for each “group”.
· Thus the plum trees can be pruned like “pips”, regularly at the beginning of their life but much less severely when they have reached about 10 years.
· Cherry trees just need a fairly rigorous training pruning in the first years, then it will be more interventions to remove badly placed or excess branches.
Be careful, the bark of cherry trees is very sensitive to sunburn
· As for the peach and almond trees, as soon as their framework is sketched out (3rd or 4th year), they will have to be pruned in a special “fishbone” way each year according to a principle similar to the pruning of the vine.
· For the apricot trees, it is more difficult to say because these trees both need to be pruned lightly, because of the risk of gummosis in our climates, and pruned a bit like peach trees.

WARNING :

For trees with old stones that have never been pruned, particularly for plum trees, which are light-hungry, they will have to be thinned out in order to limit the load of fruit which risks breaking branches, but it will be necessary to act lightly (light saw) over several years, otherwise there will be strong reactions, with the birth of greedy people who are difficult to manage.

After pruning,

Fruit trees are often quite sensitive to cryptogamic and bacterial diseases, I recommend spraying with 3% Bordeaux mixture from the end of pruning to protect wounds from contamination, especially in places sensitive to fog.

To reread:

Last year’s podcast
Understanding fruit tree pruning 2021:

*Sleeping eye is said of an eye that does not yet really exist or that after two or three years is still viable (because the eyes of trees generally lose their ability to bud out from the second year). The breakthrough of dormant eyes is stimulated by the disappearance of apical dominance.
Remember, an eye is a bud in the making (which has not yet sprouted) and a bud is a young shoot, an eye that has just opened.
Unclog definition:
Speaking of a bud, to open by releasing its bud.

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