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Spider[_3_] · 02-09-2011, 10:37 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening

On 01/09/2011 22:36, wrote:
In ,
wrote:

The damson is a prunus sp., so needs to be pruned in warm, dry weather
from April onwards. This is because the wounds heal more quickly in good
dry weather, so are less likely to succumb to Silver Leaf disease. Now
may be a bit late, but I must confess to pruning a few bits off my plum
today since the weather was good.

Yes, but when? The point is that it has to be pretty drastic,
because the tree has got out of control and there are a lot of
long, spindly branches. My inclination is after it has flowered,
though the other possibility is to pick the fruit and do it now.

If it really is that bad, then yes, choose a sunny day and do it as soon
as possible. If you don't, then winter winds will snap the branches and
Silver Leaf will enter the wounds anyway. With my old Victoria plum
tree, I often used a good day to cut back soft extension growth to a
couple of buds beyond the point where fruit was attached, doing the job
any time in summer once I could see the swelling fruit. This kept the
tree relatively compact and manageable. Be wary of doing it *just*
after flowering, as you may harm the embryo fruits, but once 'June drop'
is over you'll probably have the weather as well as the opportunity.

To make it very simple: winter pruning apples encourages growth,
summer pruning apples controls growth.

That was the problem :-( I did that, but it didn't respond at
all according to the books (or sanity), and has now got completely
out of shape. Some of this is because it is on a damned modern
dwarfing rootstock, and they always cause misbehaviour, but its
behaviour was truly weird. It has never responded to winter
pruning by new growth, has responded to summer pruning that way,
and is very reluctant to make ANY new growth except at the end
of the longest branches. So what I am planning is a short back
and sides, in the hope that hitting it hard will stimulate it
into behaving more as expected.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Oh dear! That sounds like a very confused tree .. and it's owner:~(. I
can only suppose that the summer growth spurts you're seeing are delayed
responses to your winter pruning. Is it feasible to shorten these
growths to create fruiting wood? What isn't clear is whether your apple
is tip-bearing or spur-bearing, and this may be part of the trouble.
Depending on how desperate you are and how misshapen the tree is, it
might be an idea to spread your drastic lopping over 2 or 3 years, just
to see how the wood responds.

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay