How to Prune Peach Trees

How do you prune a peach tree? This is Richard Skinner in Hawkins Corner Nursery in Plant City, Florida. All across the country you can see peach orchards and the peach trees are not extremely tall. They are very wide but they are not extremely tall and you say well my peach tree is 12, 14, 16, 18, feet tall, why? Well that's because it didn't get pruned properly. When a peach tree gets between 7 and 8 foot tall in the center main branch you want to top it. In other words you want to cut it off and make it spread, why? Because you want sunlight to penetrate all of the limbs of the peach tree as the peaches are forming. This will give you size and quality. Pruning is very very easy. The first and main thing is what I just covered. Pruning to make it spread. The other thing is that you want to in the late Summer or early Fall prune back some of the little small limbs that are coming off of your main liter branches so that they don't wind up going a lot of peaches forming on those small branches which the tree will have problems holding. Of course the obvious also is if you have got any dead limbs you want to snip those off real soon so that they don't interfere with growing new growth. Pruning a peach tree is really real easy. You just sort of shape it and do it the way you want it to be done. This is Richard Skinner at Hawkins Corner Nursery in Plant, City Florida, how to prune your peach tree.