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This is to encourage a far better harvest in addition to the standard aim of pruning to maintain growth under control and eliminate dead or diseased branches.

The problem with winter pruning, though, is you need to regulate the elements forecast so that you don’t cut the plants prior to an Arctic blast or when frost is plausible.

The one advantage of the wet weather we’re having is that it’s reasonably mild, so in case you don’t live in a flooded area you may get on with several gardening jobs that experience to be completed before the tip of the dormant period.

Only prune standard apple and pear trees in winter (cordon, espaliers and fans is additionally left until late summer) and take into accout that arduous pruning – or removing a lot of healthy branches – will lead to vigorous regrowth and less fruit because the plant fights for what it considers its own survival.

So the overall rule is to simply reduce by just a little yearly, in preference to an awful lot every few years, because in the event you don’t prune in any respect the tree will produce too many fruit that don’t grow very big.

Winter pruning of apple and pear trees may be done in early December, before potentially very cold weather, or around now, before the sap begins to rise in March; but both methods are a similar.

First you need to cut out dead, damaged or diseased branches, after which you may cut out branches that rub against others and decrease large branches by as much as a 3rd to create an open, cup shape.

Most apple and pear trees produce fruit on spurs, that are just very small branches. They’re kept short because they’re pruned once a year and this also keeps them relatively thin.

It is vital to grasp whether your apple or pear trees are spur-fruiting, tip fruiting or a mixture of both, because they want different approaches, but most garden fruit trees are spur-fruiting. These are smaller than tip fruiters.

Spur-fruiting apple trees included Braeburn, Egremont Russet, James Grieve, Orange Pippin and Spartan; tip-fruiting apple trees include Bramley, Discovery, Worcester Pearmain and Adams Pearmain.

Spur-fruiting pear trees include Conference, Merton Pride, Concorde and Sensation, while tip-fruiting pear trees include Jargonelle and Josephine de Malines.

Most tip-fruiting apple and pear trees may also produce on spurs, that is annoyingly confusing, so in case you are considering buying new trees be sure you pick a more hassle-free spur-fruiting tree.

However, when you have already got apple and pear trees but don’t know what they’re you are able to distinguish the 2 styles of fruiting by searching for the fat fruit buds. Thinner leaf and shoot buds are frequently within the axil – or space between the branch and leaf stem.

Prune spur-fruiting trees by cutting all of the side shoots back to 2 buds from the foremost stem, and for tip-fruiting trees just scale back shoots which have already fruited back to 2 buds from the primary stem.