Eagle, ID — Time for the yearly fruit tree pruning. It’s amazing how much our seven fruit trees grow during the season. We learned that you have to prune fruit trees every winter for a few reasons. One is to establish a good structure that allows for easy picking. You have to make sure there aren’t too many main branches coming off the leader causing overcrowding. You also don’t want to tree to grow straight up! Who’s going to pick plums that are 10 feet high?!

Another reason is to allow for each branch to have good access to sunlight. Most of our trees are 2 or 3 years old, so we’re still “training” them. Last year we got a few plums, but only a handful of pluots and nectarines. Then there were the apples…we got quite a few, but they all had worms! Hopefully as these trees mature we’ll get more and more fruit and this year we’re going to step up from dormant oil to a stronger pesticide to combat the worms.

These are before and after pictures of the oldest tree we have, a plum tree we adopted from our neighborhood common area. The developers had the bright idea of putting fruit trees in the common areas. But after a couple years of neglect it was decided that they were too high-maintenance so they asked for families in the subdivision to take one per household. I think we picked a good one, it’s got a good open-center structure and has produced quite a few plums each season.