Why Winter Is the Right Time to Prune

There are few better ways to spend a crisp January morning than standing beneath an apple tree with a sharp pair of secateurs in your hand. The tree is dormant, the sap is down and the whole framework is laid bare, so you can see precisely what you are doing. Pruning between leaf fall and bud burst gives the tree time to seal its wounds before growth begins again, and it will answer with vigorous new shoots once spring arrives.

Winter pruning does two jobs at once. It shapes the tree, keeping the canopy open and sturdy, and it improves the crop, because apples form best on well-ripened wood that receives plenty of light. A congested tree produces a muddle of small, crowded fruit; a well-aired one gives you larger apples with better colour and far less disease. Dense canopies trap damp, and damp means scab, canker and mildew. Light and moving air are the two greatest gifts you can give an apple tree.

Avoid pruning in a hard frost, when brittle wood shatters rather than cuts, and leave autumn alone — any soft regrowth then will not harden off before the cold. A dry, mild day in midwinter is ideal.

Tools, Timing and a Few Ground Rules

You need surprisingly little, but what you have should be sharp. Blunt tools bruise and tear, and torn bark is an open door for canker.

• Bypass secateurs for anything up to finger thickness
• Loppers for awkward, thicker shoots
• A pruning saw for limbs wider than your wrist
• Gloves, a sharpening stone and a small pot of grease or wound paint for anything substantial

Start by removing what growers call the three Ds: anything dead, diseased or damaged. Dead wood is dull and snaps easily; live wood is green under the bark and bends. Take out cankered stems well below the wound, and clean your blades afterwards so you do not carry infection to the next tree.

Then thin what remains. Cut out branches that cross, rub or grow inwards, and those that crowd the centre. As a rule, never take more than a quarter of the canopy in a single winter — a tree stripped bare will throw out a forest of useless water shoots in revenge.

Reading the Tree Before You Cut

Stand back several paces and look properly. Walk around it. The aim for most garden apples is an open, goblet-shaped tree with a clear central channel, rather as you would picture a wine glass with the bowl hollowed out. Light should be able to fall all the way down to the fruit spurs on the lowest branches.

Work from the top downwards and from the inside outwards. Deal with the biggest, most obvious problems first — a low branch sweeping the grass, a limb rubbing another raw — and then reassess. Step back after every few cuts. It is far easier to take a branch off than to put one back, and a hesitant, gradual approach almost always gives a better-shaped tree than a rushed one.

While you are up there, pull or cut any suckers sprouting from below ground or from the rootstock trunk. These belong to the rootstock, not the variety, and they will never fruit well.

Making a Clean Cut

Where you cut matters as much as what you cut. On a young shoot, cut just above an outward-facing bud, a few millimetres clear of it, sloping gently away so rain runs off rather than sitting in the bud. Never leave a long stub — it will die back and invite decay — but never cut so tight that you slice into the bud itself.

For a whole branch, look for the slight swelling where it joins its parent, known as the branch collar. Cut just outside that collar rather than flush with the trunk; the collar carries the tissue that seals the wound, and removing it slows healing.

Anything thicker than about five centimetres should come off in three stages. First make a shallow cut underneath, a hand's length out from the trunk. Then saw from above, slightly further out, until the branch falls — the undercut stops the bark tearing away. Finally remove the remaining stub cleanly at the collar.

Young Trees, Neglected Trees and Tip-Bearers

A young tree needs its framework building. Choose three to five well-spaced branches with wide, sturdy angles to form the main structure and remove anything competing with them. Shorten the leader by about a third each year to an outward bud to encourage branching. Wide angles make strong joints; a narrow fork will split under a heavy crop.

An old, neglected tree should be renovated over three winters, not one. Tackle a third of the congestion each year, starting with dead and diseased wood, and let the tree recover in between. Expect a flurry of new growth the following summer — thin it in the next dormant season rather than panicking now.

Varieties differ in where they carry fruit. Spur-bearers such as Cox's Orange Pippin and Sunset crop on short, stubby spurs along the older wood, and can be shortened and thinned confidently. Tip-bearers — Discovery, Worcester Pearmain and Egremont Russet among them — carry much of their fruit near the ends of long shoots, so leave those shoots alone and just remove whole crowded branches. Bramley is famously partial to the tip, so treat it gently and lean towards thinning rather than tipping.

Putting the Prunings to Work

Anything diseased should be burned or taken to the council recycling site — never composted, and never left lying beneath the tree. Healthy prunings are a different matter entirely. Chipped or shredded, they make excellent mulch or a tidy garden path. Left in longer lengths, they become a log pile, and a log pile is one of the finest wildlife features a garden can have: beetles, solitary bees, fungi, slow worms and perhaps a hedgehog will all make use of it in a shady corner.

Finish with a mulch of well-rotted compost spread in a wide ring around the tree, keeping it a hand's width clear of the trunk. Check stakes and ties for rubbing, loosen anything that has grown tight, and stand back to admire an open, airy canopy. Come September, you will taste the difference.