The taste of home-grown fruit is a delicacy that we are spoiled with here in the Pacific Northwest’s verdant landscape.
Our team at Foster Trees, LLC is equipped to maintain the health of your fruit trees, from tiny saplings to a full-grown orchard. We can coach you on what to plant, how to gauge the health of existing trees, and give you feedback on strategies to reduce the impacts of pests and diseases.
Fruit tree pruning is an essential aspect of horticultural maintenance, ensuring the health, vitality, and productivity of fruit-bearing trees.
This practice involves the strategic removal of specific branches or stems to enhance the tree’s structure, encourage optimal fruit production, and address issues like disease or pest infestations. We often recommend pruning to improve air circulation in the canopy or to help manage the height of trees so that fruit can remain accessible.
Timing of pruning is crucial to accomplishing the goals you’re looking to achieve in your home orchard.
Most people know that fruit trees are typically pruned during the winter dormant season. Dormant season pruning is a valuable strategy to help encourage trees to put on new growth and develop next year’s fruiting wood. Trees respond to winter pruning by invigorating with new growth.
However, we also often recommend late spring or summer pruning for trees that need help maintaining a size and shape. Summer pruning can help you maintain the height of your orchard trees without resulting in lots of new vertical shoot production. Often, a phased pruning plan is best suited to supporting backyard fruit production goals.
We can also help you revitalize older fruit trees!
If you’ve inherited a property with fruit trees that haven’t been maintained well, we can recommend a multi-phased pruning approach that can restore your trees to fruit production and make them easier to maintain.
Sometimes trees like this need attention over multiple seasons to be brought into size range and develop fruiting wood in an accessible location.
Finally, we look at the whole site and season to understand a tree’s overall health.
We can make recommendations for watering and mulching regimes to help support soil fertility and tree resilience. If you’re struggling with specific pests, we can make multiple visits to evaluate your tree in different seasons and create a plan for pest management without pesticides. We can provide recommendations for tools to identify pest species and holistically work to reduce their populations.
Connect with us today for a free estimate if you have questions about your home orchard trees.
