Pruning Apple Trees: How to Prune an Apple Tree in 7 Steps

Pruning, the process of cutting back excess growth or damaged branches, allows the tree to grow more efficiently. While it may seem counterintuitive to cut healthy growth from a tree, pruning fruit trees is an important gardening tactic that can drastically improve your tree’s health in many ways.

1. 1. Improves light penetration: Pruning side branches and scaffold limbs away from the main branches of your tree prevents too much foliage from taking over your tree. Foliage and extra branches can block light from your tree and prevent fruit from growing. With those extra branches gone, the interior branches of your tree have better access to sunlight.
   
2. 2. Results in healthier fruit: Cutting away excess growth allows your tree to devote more of its energy reserves to growing healthier apples. A mature apple tree that you prune regularly (and correctly) should have plenty of fruit that will ripen to maturity.
3. 3. Promotes proper air circulation: Removing extra foliage and branches from your tree encourages proper air circulation, which will also help prevent wind from knocking down branches or pulling the tree’s roots up.
4. 4. Maintains good tree health: When you prune an apple tree, you will typically cut away any diseased branches, preventing the spread of disease to the rest of the tree. Furthermore, properly pruning your tree prevents wounds that can let in disease from developing along your branches.
5. 5. Allows you to shape a tree: Shaping an apple tree through pruning helps your tree establish a firm foundation for your tree to grow in a healthy direction over many years.

There are two main types of cuts that growers use when pruning apple trees and fruit trees: thinning cuts and heading cuts. Here is a little more information about both types of cuts.

1. 1. Thinning cuts: Thinning involves the complete removal of large branches from the tree’s central trunk at the branch collar, which is where it connects with the trunk or limb. Thinning allows other branches of your tree to get more sunlight. This type of pruning should only be used on mature, established trees. Make sure to cut the entire branch and not leave stubs—short portions of branch leftover after a cut—because they can become portals for disease.
2. 2. Heading cuts: Heading involves removing a part of the branch or shoot so that a portion of it remains. Use a heading cut to change the direction in which a branch is growing to help promote new growth below where the branch is cut. You can also use heading cuts to help young trees redirect energy and sprout new fruit-bearing branches.

Pruning an apple tree may seem intimidating the first time you do it, but it’s a necessary step in cultivating healthy trees that will bear fruit for years to come. While all of these principles apply to both new trees and old apple trees, younger trees should be treated very gently and may require less overall pruning than mature trees. Here is a step-by-step guide of how to prune an apple tree.

1. 1. Wait for the right time. The optimal time to prune apple trees is during the late winter or in the early spring, before any new growth has emerged on the tree. Confirm that your apple trees are in a dormant state by checking that all of its leaves have fallen. Avoid pruning a tree during its first year of growth.
2. 2. Gather the right tools. When you’re pruning a tree, it’s important that you don’t make a larger-than-necessary wound in the tree. To ensure clean, safe cuts, home gardeners should use pruning tools like hand pruners, also called pruning shears, which will be best for cutting small branches, and loppers, which will cut through larger branches.
3. 3. Remove dead, diseased, and damaged wood. Start your pruning project by removing any damaged, diseased, or dead wood from your tree. Dead branches are brittle and will snap off of the tree easily. Diseased branches often have a darker color than the surrounding branches. Damaged branches might be partially broken or crossing over each other. Cut these types of branches back by cutting just above the nearest bud or at least four centimeters out from the trunk.
4. 4. Prune suckers, whorls, and water spouts. Suckers are shoots that grow at the base of the trunk, whereas whorls occur where three or more branches all grow from the same spot. Water sprouts are thin branches that grow straight up from later branches. You should prune all of these types of branches using thinning cuts at the very base of the branch, where the branch collar is located. Left to grow on their own, these types of branches can create dense leaf canopies that will prevent light from reaching the tree.
5. 5. Shape your tree to the desired shape. Evaluate the shape of your tree and look for overcrowded areas with crossing or downward-hanging branches that won’t produce fruit. Trim large branches until your tree has a conical shape with a central leader, a rounded shape, or a V shape with an open center of the tree. Shape the terminal branches on the top of the tree canopy as well as the scaffolding branches, or lateral branches, that branch out from the central leader or trunk.
6. 6. Head your tree back. Heading a tree back involves using thinning cuts to trim back the upper branches to bring the height of the tree down. This will encourage more growth in the tree’s lower branches.
7. 7. Prune any flower buds that you see. Spur branches, which are the thick branches with flower buds that will produce fruit, can become overcrowded with flower buds that will limit fruit production or cause the fruit to grow smaller or not ripen. Prune back the flower buds until the spur branch only has four or five buds. By the next year or the following year, the fruiting spurs should grow much healthier fruit.

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