If you want your peach tree to bear plenty of fruit next year, you have to prune it too. But beware, there are a few things to consider.
Peach trees have to be pruned regularly[/caption] In German gardens, the peach tree is one of the most popular fruit trees, alongside apple and pear trees.
But let me tell you one thing: if you decide to plant a peach tree, you must bear in mind that it is very demanding when it comes to care. If you want to achieve a consistently high yield, you can't avoid regular pruning, for example.
This may not sound particularly difficult, but if you are not careful and cut around the tree indiscriminately, you are more likely to damage it instead of caring for it properly. The result would be, for example, a crop failure next year. So that it doesn't get that far in the first place, we will explain to you below exactly how to proceed when cutting.
Always pruning in spring
You can usually buy a peach tree in nurseries and nurseries with a short trunk and a low crown base. This tree only bears fruit on the shoots that developed in the previous year, i.e. only on the one-year-old wood. The long shoots bear fruit only once, in the third year no more flower buds are formed there. There are then only very few leaves on it. So if you want to get a high yield, you have to make a consistent pruning every spring.
If you just let the tree grow, the fruit shoots will shorten and peaches will only form on the outer edge of the crown. So you have to make sure that the ratio between new and old shoots remains balanced. You must therefore remove at least three quarters of last year's shoots either immediately after harvest or in spring before flowering. The rest, however, you have to shorten to three buds. In this way, new shoots can be formed for the coming year.
Important: only cut off the wrong fruit shoots
true fruit shoots:
Unlike othersFruit trees, the peach tree has a special feature. Here you have to distinguish between true and false fruit shoots when pruning. You can recognize the correct fruit shoots by the fact that the rounded buds still have one or two pointed leaf buds. It is very important that these true fruit shoots are preserved when cutting, because this is where the fruit comes from. You can prune the last section of this fruit shoot, as that is usually where only leaf buds remain.
wrong fruit shoots:
The false fruit shoots also have rounded flower buds, in this respect they are indistinguishable from the real ones. However, they are not surrounded by leaf buds, so they are easy to spot on closer inspection. Peaches also develop from these shoots, but these fruits remain very small and are also dropped early. This is because the few leaves are not able to provide nutrition for the fruit. So feel free to remove those false fruit shoots entirely, or at least trim them down to a leaf bud or two.
The peach tree has a third type of shoot: the so-called bouquet shoots. Since they also have fertile buds, you must not cut them back either. However, you can remove or shorten the so-called wood shoots, because they are only needed to build up a beautiful crown.
Little tip:
Having trouble distinguishing the different buds? Then it is best to cut back when the first buds open at the beginning of the flowering period.
You have to consider this when pruning in summer
With the peach tree, it is important that the crown does not grow too densely, because the fruits need a lot of sun to ripen. It is therefore better to cut the peach tree too much than too little. You can't go too far wrong here. The right fruit tree pruning always takes place in summer. In the spring, when the flowers are in bloom, there is also a fruit tree pruning, which you have to do as described above.
It is also important that the tree gets a hollow crown over time, i.e. no central shoot, but has three or four skeletal branches. In summer, remove the shoots that grow strongly inward and all shoots that are too close together. You only have to cut back the three to four branches that form the framework of the tree from time to time.