Pruning Fruit Trees in Winter (Timelapse

Video Transcript of Pruning Fruit Trees in Winter

It's the start of winter it's a

beautiful sunny day it's a great time to

be in the garden.

so firstly it warms up

your body and you feel great and it just

makes the day feel better if you're

outside doing something it's also a

really good time to get on top of all

those jobs that have been neglected

through the year so I always say here in

the subtropics we have two seasons we

have an in control season which is

autumn and winter when you get things

under control and we have an out of

control season which is spring and

summer which is the growing season when

we get a lot of rain and it's very hard

to keep up on the maintenance so here's

a pretty good example of something

that's got out of control this is a

citron citrus and you can see the

rootstock are just taking over the tree

and if we leave this like this these

root stock are actually going to

dominate the plant and we risk losing

our graft and our Citron tree dying and

what we're going to get left with is a

Trifoliata so this is the Trifoliata

which is the root stock that our Citron

is grafted onto and it's a very thorny

plant we choose this as a root stock

because it's Hardy to heavy wet soils

it's cold hardy so it does better in

cooler conditions and it's a really

vigorous plant so it's perfect to graft

citrus onto but we do need to make sure

we cut off all the suckers and as you

can see in that out-of-control season

this has been neglected so we're going

to get it back under control today so

what we need is some tools good pair of

gardening gloves to protect my hands

I've got a pruning saw and I've got some

cutters and I've got my secretaries

which are always on my hip so you can't

go wrong maintain your tools keep them nice and sharp

we're ready to tackle this job

so here we have our same Citron or

Buddhas Hand tree as it's also called

after we've taken the red stock out and

you can see what a completely different

looking plant it is so I've got my pile

of rootstock behind me and it was nearly

the same volume as that tree but the

easiest way to do it is cut the top off

and that way it gets all the deadly

spikes from your head height and it

makes them easier to actually take from

the bottom or weave your way out of the

existing tree because you don't want to

damage your plant so what we can do now

is we can do a bit of pruning a bit of

shaping to this plant and then in a

couple of weeks time once the weather

starts to warm up we're going to

fertilize it so you're not going to

fertilize it in the dead of winter but

as soon as spring starts to show you're

going to give this tree a good complete

fertilizer so balanced NPK fertilizer

they're heavy feeders and they love it

so that's how to deal with your rootstock

starting get your trees back under

control

in the winter when you have some time

and you want to be outside getting warm

in the garden