Gardeners always think ahead and we have to start planning for next year’s top fruit even before we’ve started picking our apples and plums.
This is especially important for plums and other members of the prunus genus - greengages, cherries, peaches, and apricots. The silver leaf fungus attacks, damages and eventually kills these trees by gaining access through open wounds caused by pruning while the tree is dormant. So foil the disease by pruning while the tree is actively growing and can quickly heal the wounds.
With plums and their relatives, you’re doing two things: reducing fresh shoots to around 15cm and pruning to achieve the desired shape of the tree. Removing the new growth allows the plum to put its energy into starting a strong young fruiting bud for next year and better air circulation and light will help the fruits to ripen.
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But because the tree is laden with fruit at the moment, you may want to restrict yourself to shortening fresh shoots and not risk losing any of this fruit.
Immediately after harvesting, embark on more major pruning. Remove crossing stems and skywards aiming branches because picking fruit that high becomes well nigh impossible and you’ll get next to no fruit on vertical stems. You’ll possibly need to remove one or at most two old branches, cutting right back to the trunk.
Trained apple and pear trees - cordon and espalier - should also be summer pruned, reducing new shoots and nipping off any that are pointing in the wrong direction. If any older branches need pruning, only do so if you won’t knock off any developing fruit. You may need to delay this till after harvest, but time isn’t critical as with Prunus species.
Standard apples and pears are best pruned in late winter. This is much better as the lack of leaves gives you a good idea of the tree’s shape and what changes you might want to make.
Quite a few gardeners, including me, summer prune standards as well as trained trees, shortening fresh shoots and so letting in more light and air to the ripening fruit and forming buds. I keep my standards fairly low-growing to make care and harvesting much easier, and do find it better to reduce vegetative growth this way.
Plant of the week
Sunflower 'Micro Sun Yellow' has the same cheery yellow flowers as its taller relatives. Brightening up a grey day and attracting lots of bees and butterflies. You might even get ripe seeds in autumn for the birds.
Sunflowers are renowned for tracking the sun as it moves from east to west but it seems that they use a variety of different wavelengths of light to do this, not just the blue light end of the spectrum as most plants do. The light stimulates the growth hormones auxins on the shady side of a stem, elongating the cells and pushing the stem towards the light. Sunflowers then reverse the procedure at night so the stem is pushed back towards the east ready for the rising sun.
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