Winter Pruning: When and Why
You may not be thinking much about your yard while cuddled up inside during these cold winter months, the truth is, there are many benefits to pruning your trees and shrubs during the winter. Pruning prevents damage, helps shape growth, allows for better harvests, and keeps plants healthy. With the leaves gone, a plants structure is clearly visible, providing a direct sightline to the interior growth habits. As such, it is often easier to identify issues and make sound pruning decisions.
Reasons to Prune
Beyond routine pruning, consider the specific purpose of trees and shrubs in the landscape. Pruning may be critical to preserving that function.
Damage Prevention: When seasons change, ice and heavy snow can cause branches to break either under the weight of snow or under the stress of windstorms. These breaks can cause major damage to both your property and to the tree itself. Pruning can help prevent heavy branches from breaking and falling onto houses, sheds, or other structures.
Disease Prevention and Treatment: Pruning allows more air to flow through a tree’s branches. This can prevent fungal infections that thrive on excess moisture. Unhealthy, diseased trees should also be pruned to prevent diseases from spreading. After each cut, disinfect the pruning tool with bleach or alcohol to prevent the disease from spreading to other branches.
Shaping and Guiding: Especially during the beginning phases of a tree’s life, it’s important to monitor how the tree grows. Pruning will allow you to encourage even growth and a more beautiful and stable shape.
Better Nutrition and Growth: Crown pruning cuts back foliage from the top of a tree allowing sunlight to reach more branches (especially lower branches), which helps create new growth.
Better Fruit and Flower Yield: With fewer branches to focus on; pruning has been shown to increase the size and quality of fruits that a tree produces
Important Tree Pruning Tips:
Never remove more than 1/3 of the tree limbs per year.
Avoid pruning around power lines—call an electrical company instead.
Remember that pruning practices for fruit trees vary depending on the type of tree.
Pruning a branch consists of three cuts. (see diagram)
Right Time and Place
When performed properly, pruning ends up being a great investment in your landscape. There are many nuances to pruning and it can be more complicated than people tend to realize. You want to know that whoever is performing this work knows exactly what to look for on your tree in order to make smart cuts. Knowing why cuts will be made is the basis for determining which cuts should be made. The ability to better see the tree’s form, and identify issues that might otherwise go undetected, makes winter the ideal time for pruning.
Related: How Irrigation Requirements for your Lagrangeville Landscape Change in Fall and Winter