How to Spring Prune Your Fruit Trees
Steph MumaIf you read our first pruning blog post in this series, you’ll already know how important spring pruning is for your fruit trees of any age, but in particular for your fruit trees’ first years of life! Today we’re going to go into lots of detail about how to do dormant spring pruning, tree anatomy, and the terms you’ll hear orchardists saying, so buckle up!
If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed with all the info, take it in through several sessions, or check out the resources linked at the end of this post if you might learn better through a more visual, video or audio-based format.
We’ll start with a quick review of the threefold goal of dormant pruning young trees:
- Pruning your tree while it’s young balances out the root to shoot ratio when the tree needs to establish its strong healthy roots underground.
- Dormant pruning encourages the vigorous vegetative growth that allows the tree to build the strength it needs in its branches in order to support and grow is bountiful fruit crops.
- And lastly, maintaining a healthy open canopy reduces disease pressure and increases the amount of sunlight reaching through the canopy to shine on each piece of fruit which improves fruit quality!
What Gear Will You Need?
Now, before you head out to do any pruning, let’s talk about your tools.
For young trees between 1-5 years, you likely will only need pruners and perhaps a pair of loppers and a sturdy ladder. We are partial to our Felco pruners for their high quality and have found Fiskars and Bahco loppers to perform and hold up well through lots of pruning. If you’re pruning mature trees, you might also want a pruning saw.
If you’re not sure, take a walk out to see the tree(s) you plan to prune and perhaps test your loppers to determine what is the maximum diameter they can handle – you want your cuts clean, and loppers (and pruners) can do a lot of damage if you use them on a branch that is too big for your strength level or the loppers’ capacity!
If you’re going to be pruning more than one tree, we recommend 50% isopropyl alcohol in a spray bottle to clean your blades between trees, which will reduce risk of disease being unwittingly passed along.
Let’s also quickly review the dormant pruning timing that was outlined in our previous post:
Dormant Pruning Timing
Keep in mind the window for dormant pruning is typically quite wide: in Southern Ontario we can often prune from February to early April. However, if there are severe dips in the coming forecast or temps around -17C or colder, we recommend waiting to prune for warmer weather, so as not to harm the tree.
On the flip side, we also want to have pruning done before bud swell to avoid stressing the tree. Look to the Red and Silver Maples in your area – if they are breaking buds, know that your dormant pruning window is closing!
The 1/3 Rule
The 1/3 rule is to never remove more than 1/3 of a tree at a time - dead branches do not count towards that 1/3rd. When dormant pruning, you’ll want to choose how much to prune based partially on your tree’s age:
On mature trees, you might hardly prune at all, focusing on minor shaping and tidying up the canopy; more of your mature tree pruning might happen as summer pruning (a future blog post!). Your mature tree dormant pruning can look like removing dead or crossing branches, maintaining an open canopy, or refining your shape. In the case of a neglected middle-aged tree, you may need to adopt the 1/3rd rule to remove material over several years to bring the tree back into a productive shape without harming it. (Reminder, we will cover restoring a mature old tree, in a post of its own in March.)
However, on young trees (aged approx. 1-5 years, depending on the rootstock and fruit variety) we especially want to prune about 1/3 of the tree away when it’s dormant! This may seem like a lot, but it’s important for encouraging the new branch growth that we want + increasing the energy the tree puts into fattening up the branches it already has (heavy fruit crops, here we come!)
Pruning away more than 1/3rd of your tree can set it back, so if you are unsure, take some time to step back, pause and look. With larger trees in our orchards we constantly find ourselves backing up, looking up, circling around the tree to assess the canopy and which branches make the most sense to remove; and even looking at everything we’ve cut away lying under the tree to assess how much we’ve taken and stop ahead of taking away too much.
With younger trees it’s a bit easier to assess how much to remove because there are simply less branches, but you can absolutely measure a young tree if you need to get yourself calibrated! It may also be worth noting, for folks looking to do espalier, that very young trees can have 80% pruned away to shape it for espaliering or ‘step overs’ in Victorian gardens – this post is not planning to get quite that specialized.
Pruning Lingo and Fruit Tree Anatomy
This next section covers both lingo and tree anatomy that you’ll want to be able to identify before (and as) you prune.
Vegetative Growth and Leaf Buds: Recognizing vegetative growth buds will not be a new concept to folks who are avid gardeners reading this, but it becomes important to learn how to differentiate between vegetative growth and fruit buds when your tree is older. 1-year vegetative growth shoots can always be found by starting that the terminal (end) of a branch and working back toward the tree. The bark will generally be smoother and slightly shinier with a more vibrant maroon or brown colour. Meanwhile, older 2-year (and beyond) growth is more dull and may have a grayish tinge along with more texture. You can see the growth collars splitting up bouts of growth, but it is worth noting that a tree can have in-season growth spurts due to rain and other factors that cause a growth collar between two sections of 1-year growth. The key is to look at the bark colours and textures and bud types (below).
Now that we’ve talked about vegetative growth bark, what about the leaf buds? Leaf buds are slender, triangular-pointed nubbins (see above) on these young branches. You might notice that their placement is an example of the Fibonacci sequence in nature, spiraling from the tip of each branch, with spacing getting wider as the girth of the branch increases! These buds will generally be quite small and flat when dormant, plumping up as they begin to get ready to leaf out. As the trees grow older, leaf buds disappear under the thickening bark, becoming latent. They may become water sprouts at some point if conditions lead to that. Besides learning how to tell a leaf bud from a fruit bud, we always want to ensure we are pruning just above a bud when doing heading cuts.
Fruit Spurs and Fruit Buds: Some fruit trees are tip-bearing and others are spur-bearing. Once your tree is old enough to begin bearing fruit crops you’ll need to know how to identify fruit buds or spurs so that you don’t prune away your crop! Whether on a spur or on a tip, fruit buds are plumper than leaf buds and often develop a soft, sometimes fuzzy appearance as spring progresses, though you may not see fuzz as much during your dormant pruning timeframe. On a tip-bearing variety, the fruit buds will be on the tips of branches. On a spur-bearing variety, the tree will grow small, knobbly looking fruit spurs along the branch. They look like short, heavily-growth-collared 2-4cm (or sometimes longer) branches with fat buds at the tips. Spurs develop most on lateral, horizontal, sprawling branches, not on upright water sprouts (see water sprouts below). Spurs also require time for hormone changes to cause them to begin blooming the first time, which is why we use summer pruning to set our trees up for fruitfulness for the following year (more about summer pruning in a future blog post!). Once your tree is old enough, you’ll adjust your pruning to keep or encourage formation of fruit spurs, but while your tree is in its primary years, developing a strong, open structure is the focus.
In addition to your pruning, you may also want to consider training some of your branches to grow more horizontally (using weights, tree ties or limb spreaders) while your tree is younger – this takes advantage of the branches being smaller and more bendy and sets them up to grow laterally/horizontally, which in turn helps them make the hormonal changes that lead to fruit production.
When your tree finally does produce its first fruit crop, it is recommended to remove it while it is still at blossom or baby-fruit stage so that you tree can continue focusing on building its strong branches. Then for the second crop, one can thin the fruit as needed, both to prioritize keeping your branches from being overly weighed down and to produce better, bigger fruits since your tree will be able to put more energy into less outputs, creating a smaller, but tastier first harvest.
Now, this is a lot of information all in one go, and we’re about to keep adding to it. Remember, you don’t need to stress about learning all of this immediately after buying and planting a fruit tree, you have several years. If you keep your focus on pruning for vegetative growth during these first few years and watch to see what buds look like as your tree matures – you’ll learn more than you realize just from observing your tree and how it responds to your dormant pruning each year!
Water Sprouts: These are vigorous and almost completely vertical branches that grow from latent buds on the trunk or larger main branches of a tree. They can develop as a response to various factors such as heavy rainfall during the previous growing season, regular pruning, over-pruning, storm damage, drought or sub-par soil, and even in response to pests or diseases, but they are completely normal to see on healthy fruit trees too. Water sprouts are generally not as strong as natural tree growth and are usually pruned out of the tree as part of the 1/3rd taken during dormant pruning.
Suckers: These are basically the same thing as water sprouts, but instead they sprout from the ground at the base of the tree trunk. If your tree is a grafted variety, these will just be rootstock, and they should be pruned away!
Growth Collar: This is the wrinkled bit of bark at the base of a branch. When pruning, you want to leave this and make your pruning cut tight after the collar, not flush to the tree. Leaving the collar intact ensures speedier healing over the cut. Avoid leaving a stub when cutting at a growth collar, as that can become an entry point for disease.
Heading & Thinning Cuts
Heading Cut: This is done by cutting the tip (called the terminal bud) off a branch, which results in a hormone (auxin) change in the branch causing a branching reaction in the buds below your cut. A heading cut must remove that terminal bud, but can happen virtually anywhere along the branch as long as it’s not right at the base (this then becomes a thinning cut). Think of energy flowing through the branch, and after you have done a heading cut, it has nowhere to go so it pops out in all directions: on young wood, it produces a strong branching effect. The first 2-3 buds below the cut will naturally shoot up with vertical growth, letting buds 4-6 create nice naturally horizontal little branches a few weeks later. Make a heading cut in the spring, come back and selectively remove those extra/unwanted shoots in June/July, and you'll set your tree up to put the rest of its growing energy into developing those nicely angled, horizontal branches for the rest of the season.
A heading cut should be made about ¼ inch (6mm) above a bud at a 45 degree angle, which can also be remembered using your driving hand positions, 10 o’clock or 2 o’clock (technically those are 60 degree angles, but these are approximations so don’t stress!) It’s important to understand the different growth response from a heading cut versus a thinning cut, so you can ‘design’ the canopy you want for future years to come as you prune your tree in the present.
Thinning Cut: These are cuts made to remove an entire branch at its point of origin, thinning out the tree and allowing more air and sunlight into the canopy. They tend to create less of a push of growth than heading cuts. Think of energy flowing through the branch, and after you have done a thinning cut the energy just continues to flow peacefully past along the remaining branch. Thinning cuts can include removing water sprouts, crisscrossing branches, and to establish scaffold-shapes while the tree is young. The driving-hand angles mentioned above are also good to use as a judgement for deciding (if needed) which branch to keep and which to thin out – aim to keep the ones with the better natural crotch angle (10 or 2), since a more acute angle will have less strength and more future susceptibility to for splitting under a heavy crop load. Thinning cuts should be made tight to the growth collar and not flush against the tree.
Typical Fruit Tree Shapes
Finally, before we give you a step-by-step pruning guide to take with you, let’s talk about typical fruit tree shapes. Note that while you can make a huge influence on your tree’s shape by pruning, some varieties will have growth habits that lead you to choose one structure over another – watch what effect your pruning has on your tree each year, and remember to be aware of tip-bearing and spur-bearing varieties.
Central Leader/Scaffold Structure: This shape is common for apples and pears and works well on trees of all sizes but it will tend to require you to be able to use a tall ladder for harvest as a semi-dwarf or full-sized tree matures. This method is all about creating scaffold branches about 2 feet apart up the central trunk. The first scaffold is typically 2/3' off the ground, depending on the orchardist. Each scaffold has 3-4 scaffold branches radiating evenly, horizontally outwards. To ensure sunlight and air circulation, the layers you create for the scaffold structure should be kept wide enough (i.e. the 2 feet approximation) to visually “throw a cat” through the tree and not have it hit any branches.
Open Center/Vase Structure: Prunus species (cherries, plums, peaches, and apricots) tend to have a very open branching habit and are particularly suited to this open center structure. This shape is also common for full-sized and semi-dwarf apples and pears. Just like it sounds, this method involves sculpting your trees to have 3-4 'leaders', shaped like a vase or a bit like an upside down Christmas tree. This can also help diffuse the height on high-vigour trees, by encouraging the tree to spread its vegetative growth out rather than up. This can help keep your crop a bit lower and easier to harvest from the ground or with a shorter ladder. As above, the “throw a cat” through the tree visualization for ensuring sunlight and air-circulation is applicable. When pruning a whip for the first time, it’s best to prune it about 4 to 6 inches above where you want the ‘vase’ to begin.
Spindle Structure: This shape is for trellised (espalier) or high-density orchard trees, and can be used for trees on dwarf rootstocks which are supported by a trellis, fence or wall. Be sure to use spur-bearing varieties.
Apples and pears can be well suited to any of the typical fruit tree structures outlined above, while Prunus species are more suited to vase-styles as mentioned. Pears tend to grow in an upright manner, and thus you will likely need to use limb-spreaders or weights to help open the canopy up. You may need limb-spreaders on other fruit trees as well, don’t limit that just to pears if you find your tree needs some help!
The Steps for Dormant Pruning Your Tree
You will use a combination of thinning and heading cuts to develop your desired structure for future crops:
- Always practice sanitary pruning: sterilize your pruning tools with a mild bleach or alcohol solution to prevent unwittingly spreading disease between trees.
- Remove all dead wood (remember, this doesn’t count in your ‘1/3), then assess the tree and decide how you want to shape it.
- If needed, remove any diseased branches and ensure that they are removed from the orchard and burned/destroyed.
- Remove branches crossing over one another or growing in towards the trunk, and any vertical shoots (aka water sprouts) inside the center structure.
- Finish any shaping cuts as needed. Remember, the harder you prune (within that 1/3rd of your tree), the stronger the vegetative growth will be.
- In the initial years, focus more on producing vegetative growth (heavier spring pruning) and developing a strong, weight bearing structure for your crop. After 3-5 years (depending on rootstock/fruit variety) prune lighter in the spring and switch to summer pruning (more on this in post 5 of our pruning series!) to avoid excessive vegetative growth.
Lastly, remember that pruning is an intuitive skill that develops over years. When you prune, observe the growth response! There are many ways to prune trees and variables for how to prune range depending on who you ask, what species you are growing, and the cultivar within that species.
If you have a specific question about dormant spring pruning after reading this in-depth blog post, please let us know in the comments!
Want a printable Key Concepts summary? Download our online catalogue and print out the “Pruning, In a Nutshell” page. Then keep the digital catalogue copy and check out all the other great resources it offers!!
You can read our other online pruning resource here, it does have additional links for learning about pruning for fruit production if you don’t want to wait for our summer pruning blog post in June/July 2025.
If you want more and are a visual/audio learner, we recommend the 4-hour Pruning Masterclass offered by our affiliate, Orchard People.
And finally, here is the photo with spurs circled so you can see if you were correctly identifying them from the photo earlier in this post. 
This 5 part blog series begins focused on young trees and is intended to help our new and intermediate growers who are beginning their orchard journey. Posts will follow the following approximate topic list and timing below.
Post 1: Planning Your Most Important Spring Orchard Task
Post 2: Spring Pruning: Fruit Trees (that’s this post!)
Post 3: Pruning Berry Bushes & Vines (early March 2025)
Post 4: Pruning An Old Apple Tree (mid/late March 2025)
Post 5: Summer Pruning (June or July 2025)