Summer pruning & tree care

Many people feel that the summer is a time when you should be able to sit back, relax, and enjoy your garden, but actually it can be a very busy time for tree pruning. In fact, the summer is almost as important a time for pruning as the winter, when the trees are dormant.

Cutting back trees in the summer has plenty of benefits, not least the fact that it can help to restrict the height and width of your trees, which will prevent them from outgrowing the space you have allocated to them. Pruning in the summer can also help with promoting future fruiting and flowering.

Let’s take a closer look at the main reasons you need to prune your trees in the summer:

Many fruit trees, including apple trees, crab apple trees, and medlars, will produce a crop of short flowering spurs along the bottom half of their branches. These short flowering spurs don’t need pruning as such, but cutting back on vigorous growth in the summer will encourage more productive growth to develop going forward.

It is a little-known fact that trees in the cherry family are susceptible to silver leaf disease, whose fungal spores are airborne between September and May. Pruning cherry trees in summer, therefore, helps to avoid tree infection, as well as being a good time to cut out any weak or competing branches.

If you leave your tree unpruned, it can very quickly outgrow the space you want it to fill. Carefully pruning back the branches can help you to limit the size of your tree and also encourage new more productive side branches to form.

If you have to remove a lot of branches then you may need the help of a qualified tree surgeon.

Early shaping and training of your tree or trees is crucial in order to create a strong framework of branches, as well as better leaf growth in the trees early years.