Orange Tree Pruning

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about orange tree pruning. Now orange trees are such a beautiful plant and they're great to grow if you live in a warm climate you can leave them outside, if you live in a cold climate, you can always grow them outside and leave them in the greenhouse or the garage for the winter and they'll usually survive. And in warm climates they actually produce fruit and bloom in the wintertime. So the best time to prune them is when they're not producing fruit. So that would be actually in the fall or even in the late summer so that they will produce the fruit for the next year. So there's some simple rules that you can follow. So when you're pruning any kind of fruit tree, the goal is to cut out a lot of the random branches towards the top of the tree because those are usually the more fruity branches that's going to produce the more fruit and you want to thin it out about one third the size each year. And that way it won't just get tall and lanky and it will fill up and you will get a lot more fruit quicker. And so just by cutting out see the lighter colored branches, you can get lot more fruit and you just trim them out and even it out so there's more sun that gets into the middle branches and the tree will do much better. If you have a fruit tree that's been established and it's really tall and not producing fruit and you have not pruned it very much, then you can actually cut out some of the top branches and what you're making is called a vase cut. By doing that, you're forcing most of the growth back down to the bottom part of the tree and you'll get a lot more fruit for the next year. So when you're pruning any type of a tree, you want to be really careful to cut it at the right angle. For example, if it's a large branch, you want to cut first at one side and then the other side and then you're cutting that whole heavy branch off. Because if you just cut from one angle it might actually hurt some of the bark and get into the main trunk and you never want to hurt the main trunk because you will lose a tree if it gets too damaged. And you don't want to cut it too far out either where the C D cut is because what happens is then it gets too much moisture and it will rot and there's too much dead material. You want to cut it right at a little bit of an angle leaving one to two inches right at where the tree is reading with the main trunk. Same thing, you never want to cut right up to the trunk line and make a solid cut because what happens is the tree gets very damaged and sometimes it will eventually kill the tree because it doesn't have bark to protect the main trunk and that is what's needed. So by just cutting some of the dead branches out and thinning your tree not more than one third each year, you will find you will get lots more oranges for the following year.