Maintain Tool Hygiene and Adapt Pruning

point to make if you're going tree to tree and you don't want to spread disease it's a good idea to have a rag with you and basically you can take that rag or take a coffee cup and pour some rubbing alcohol in there and clean your clippers in between so clean your pruners in between trees if you suspect any disease because if you don't and it has blight on it you can move it from tree to tree to tree let's look at another tree look at how busy this tree is look at how many branches we have here we have a lot of growth in this tree and we don't need that much growth okay so we're gonna take out most of these lololo branches and we're gonna leave probably four or five of the major branches with the right crotch angle starting down low here get a little sniffing going on something you need to think about when you're doing your trees in your orchard is this is your tree and you have artistic freedom to make it grow however you want it to grow so if you wanted to grow out and go where you can do that you can do whatever you want to with your tree but you need to open up all these branches we're gonna have to take some out so we can open it up and promote growth and get the tree to grow the way we want it to grow there's no real wrong way but you'll learn over time what you did wrong and hopefully you'll learn from it so the next time you do your fruit trees you'll learn a little bit more now I'll trim my trees probably a little bit different then you'll trim your trees and a pro orchard guy will probably trim them a little bit different I suggest you go online and you watch a bunch of videos ok pile all that knowledge before you go out and you cut your fruit trees take yourself some notes and get out there and work and have some fun enjoy your life be outside it's beautiful out here today our beautiful orchard and I'm really happy to share it with you guys so the major take-home messages here are when you trim trim the ones that have the sharp crotch angle you're shooting for a 90 degree almost crotch angle if something is really tight it's gonna make a weak spot and that branch is gonna crack and break at some point get the crisscross growth out all that criss-crossing growth anything that's touching any inward growth you want to get rid of that inward growth if you have to cut the top out of the main leader the central leader of the tree be sure you leave about that much about 3 buds on it so that in the springtime or in the summertime it starts to grow…