Why a Little Pruning Goes a Long Way

An apple tree left entirely to its own devices will still crop, but it will do so grudgingly. The canopy thickens, branches cross and rub, and the fruit forms mostly on the outside where the light reaches. Inside, damp air lingers, and that is where scab, canker and mildew take hold. A few well-judged cuts each year change all of that. You are not trying to sculpt a showpiece; you are simply opening the tree up, keeping it within a size you can manage, and steering its energy into fruiting wood rather than another metre of sappy growth.

The good news is that apples are forgiving. Unlike plums and cherries, which should be pruned in summer to avoid silver leaf, apples are happy with winter work. You can afford to make mistakes and correct them next year.

Getting Your Timing Right

Most of the structural work happens between late November and early March, while the tree is dormant. The ideal window is a dry, mild spell in January or February, avoiding hard frost, when the sap is down and the wounds will callous over cleanly before spring growth begins.

• Winter (dormant): shaping, removing whole branches, thinning out congested growth, taking out dead or diseased wood.
• Summer (August): shortening long whippy shoots to encourage fruiting spurs, and thinning fruit itself.
• Avoid: pruning in autumn, when fungal spores are active and the tree cannot heal quickly.

If you only have one session in you, make it the winter one. Summer work is a refinement, not a necessity.

The Three Cuts That Do Most of the Work

Walk around the tree and look up into it before you touch a blade. You are looking for problems, and almost all of them fall into three categories.

• Remove anything dead, diseased or damaged. Cut back to healthy wood, to a visible collar of raised bark where the branch meets its parent. Dead wood is dead weight, and canker-ridden limbs spread infection. Do not leave stubs – they die back and invite disease.
• Take out crossing and rubbing branches. Where two branches chafe, one will win and the other will wound. Remove the weaker, less well-placed of the two, cutting flush with the branch it grows from.
• Thin the congested centre. Aim for a goblet or wine-glass shape, with an open middle and branches radiating outwards. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to stand beneath the tree and see daylight through the canopy from several angles, and there should be roughly a hand's width of clear air between the main limbs.

Make every cut just above an outward-facing bud, sloping away from it at about 45 degrees, roughly a centimetre above the bud. That bud becomes next year's extension growth, heading away from the centre of the tree.

Shaping a Young Tree

A one- to three-year-old tree is the easiest thing in the world to shape, and the work you do now saves you years of correction later. Choose four or five strong branches evenly spaced around the trunk and at different heights, and shorten each by about a third, cutting to an outward bud. Remove everything else that competes with them.

Once you have your framework, the leader – the topmost central shoot – can be shortened each winter to a bud facing the direction you want the tree to extend. This keeps the tree at a sensible picking height rather than letting it race skyward.

Taming an Older, Overgrown Tree

If you have inherited a neglected tree, resist the urge to sort it out in one heroic afternoon. Apples respond to hard pruning by producing a forest of upright shoots and very little fruit.

• Spread the work over two or three winters.
• Remove no more than a quarter of the canopy in any one year.
• Start with the obvious: dead wood, rubbing branches, and anything growing straight up through the middle.
• Shorten the tallest limbs by cutting back to a side branch, which lowers the crown and lets in light.

Old spur-bearing varieties such as Bramley's Seedling and Cox's Orange Pippin fruit on short, stubby spurs on wood two years and older. Be sparing with those spurs – they are where your crop lives.

Thinning the Fruit in Summer

This is the cut that most gardeners skip, and it is the one that gives the most immediate reward. In late June or early July, after the natural June drop has finished, apples will be sitting in tight clusters of three or four. Thin them to one or two per cluster, leaving roughly 10–15cm between the fruit you keep.

Use thumb and forefinger, or a pair of small scissors, and take the smallest, blemished or central fruit first – the "king" fruit in the middle of a cluster is often misshapen. The remaining apples swell noticeably larger, the tree is less likely to slip into biennial cropping, and the branches will not groan under the weight come September.

Tools, Cleanliness and the Following Year

You need very little: a good pair of bypass secateurs for anything up to a finger's thickness, loppers for up to about 3cm, and a pruning saw for the rest. Bypass blades cut cleanly; anvil types crush the wood and should be kept for deadwood only.

Keep the blades sharp and clean them with a little methylated spirit between trees, particularly if you have been cutting out canker. Paint cuts larger than a two-pound coin with a wound sealant, though smaller cuts are best left alone to callous naturally.

Finally, gather up the prunings – especially any diseased wood – and burn or bin them rather than adding them to the compost heap. Stand back, look at the shape you have created, and make a note of anything to revisit next winter. A tree pruned steadily, year after year, will reward you with cleaner fruit, happier airflow, and a structure you can actually reach.