How to Plant a Fruit Tree

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It seemed like a simple enough garden question to answer. The writer of the email, Steve, said: “I have never cared for a young peach tree or any other variety so I don’t know what to do since I got it in the ground. Now what?” Steve included a picture of the tree, which you can see here.

America’s favorite retired college horticulture professor, Debbie Flower, and I ended up having more questions and comments after closely studying the picture. The end result? An episode mostly dedicated to how to plant a fruit tree to insure success. This was originally recorded for the Garden Basics podcast in July of 2020, thus the reference to a hot summer and the muffled sounds of us talking with mandatory masks on.

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TRANSCRIPT

Q&A: How to Plant and Care for a Young Fruit Tree

Farmer Fred

Let’s delve into the mailbag, more mail coming into Fred at farmerfred.com here on the garden basics podcast. And we bring in Debbie Flower, retired horticultural professor at many universities and colleges, and she owns a peach tree too. So this is right up her alley. Steve writes in and says, “I have never cared for a young peach tree or any other variety. So I don’t know what to do now that I got it in the ground and mulched. I was given good info and how to put it in the ground. And I believe I was successful. But now what? The tree came in a typical pot with all its roots and dirt, I’m watching online videos, and it’s left me unsure of what to do and when.” Well, Steve was very kind to send along a picture of his new peach tree that he just planted. It’s a little difficult to say how tall the tree is currently, but it looks like…well, let’s just play, ‘what’s wrong with this picture’, Debbie? What’s wrong with Steve’s picture of his peach tree? I see several issues there.

Staking Techniques for Young Trees

Debbie Flower

Well, the first thing that jumps out at me is that the stake is taller than the peach tree. We only want to stake a tree, even a newly planted one, if it is unable to stand up on its own. If it is unable to stand up on its own, then we want to tie it. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like it could be tied at two locations. Not sure if that lower one is really there.

Farmer Fred

I think that’s a big branch down there.

Debbie Flower

Okay. Oh, yes. So we only want to tie it as low as we can, to make it stand up straight. He has it tied nearly at the top of the tree.

Farmer Fred

That’s a very good point you’re making there is that when you’re staking a tree, you want the tie to be at that point where the tree would actually bend. So what you do, you run your hand up the trunk of the tree and at that point where you can get the tree to stand up, that’s where you would tie the top loop.

Debbie Flower

Exactly, but he can’t tell if it’s going to fall over because if you look right down at the bottom, it is still attached to the nursery stakes. Nursery stakes are used to get that initial upright growth out of the stem, but it prevents the tree stem, fruit tree or otherwise from moving in the wind and from developing strength.

And so you need to take it off . I think of it as trees in bondage. When they’re tied this close to the stake, it’s very useful in the nursery, employees can pick up the tree and move it and throw it in a truck and take it out of the truck and the upright part of the tree stays stable, but it is not what we want for the ultimate life of the tree. We want that trunk to strengthen. In order to do that the trunk has to move in the wind just like we have to use our muscles in order for them to strengthen. That trunk has to move in the wind to strengthen, so take it off of that nursery stake and take it off of the very tall stake and see what happens and it is very likely to fall over, not right onto the soil; if it falls over and hits the soil you dig it out and take it back to the nursery. That means there’s a root problem. Somewhere along the length of that tree, that trunk will curve and the top of the trunk of the tree will bend down toward the earth. And that’s when you do what you said, which is run your hand up from the bottom of the tree and at some point the top of the tree will zing back up in the air. That’s the point at which you want to attach the trunk of the peach tree to the stake.

Preferably you have two stakes, one on either side of the trunk and you want them a distance from the trunk of the tree, maybe a foot. The reason for that is you don’t want the tree when it is moving in the wind to rub against those stakes and you don’t want them any taller than you need them to be. So the height of the stake would be just maybe five inches above that, about the height of your hand on that trunk. Maybe it’s three inches, just a few inches above, so that you have room to tie. You’re going to tie the trunk to both stakes at about the same location on the tree trunk to each stake, so it looks like one line across from one stake to the tree and back and then from the other stake to the tree and back. It appears when you look at it to be one line across. Does that makes sense?

Farmer Fred

Yes, it makes perfect sense. And again, he would want if the tree needed to be staking and that goes back to see if the tree can stand up by itself. But if the tree needs staking you would use two and to his credit, Steve did use green tape that’s like tree tie tape, It’s called. And what we don’t know because we can’t see into the foliage of how he’s tied it to the tree. If it’s a figure eight or wrapped, really tightly around the tree, it shouldn’t be wrapped tightly on the tree, it should be sort of a loose figure eight configuration, right?

Debbie Flower

Right. And that’s part of using two stakes. Because if it’s loose, then the tree may fall toward the stake. If you have one loosely pulling it toward the stake on the other side, then that corrects that problem.

Farmer Fred

To Steve’s credit, he’s done a lot of things right here we can see that the tree is located in full sun. It looks like he has mulch underneath the tree but the mulch is not touching the trunk of the tree.

Pruning New Deciduous Fruit Trees

Farmer Fred

But I want to go back even further to when he planted the tree. It looks to be a five or six foot tree. Now if he bought this fruit tree, what they call bare root, which would be before it leafed out, and they used to sell fruit trees basically plunked into sawdust and you would go and you’d pull it out of the sawdust and they’d wrap it up a newspaper for you to take it home. Now even though it’s still called bare root, most fruit trees that are sold are come in pots. So we don’t really know if the tree had leafed out before he bought it or if it was still dormant when he did buy it, but the fact of the matter is, when you get a bare root fruit tree home, one of the first things you need to do is basically cut it off at the knee so you get lower branching, this one doesn’t look like it was cut off at the knee.

Debbie Flower

Correct. Some people may Saturday here that you cut a fruit tree off at the knee. But that is to keep the fruit bearing branches low to the ground so that you don’t have to stand on a ladder to take care of them. It’s a really wonderful way to grow fruit.

Farmer Fred

Exactly and and you’re not inhibiting the production of fruit at all. You’d still have plenty of fruit is just going to develop some lower scaffolding to make it easier for you to pick fruit. What’s great about starting with a new tree is it makes it Much easier for keeping that tree at a height that’s manageable. So you never have to get on a ladder. And basically, you stick your hand as far in the air as you can. And you don’t let the tree get any taller than that.

Debbie Flower

Right? The height of the tree is is where your hand and the pruning shears when you raise your hand above your head, the highest it goes. That’s how tall you want the plant to be.

Farmer Fred

If he’s only planted the tree, could he cut it back in half now? Or should he wait until the dormant season? And can you even cut it back one year into its growth?

Debbie Flower

Pruning to fruit trees can happen during the growing season Yes, but right now we’re in the maybe thick of summer. It’s hot,

Farmer Fred

It’s hot.

Debbie Flower

It’s very sunny. We wear sunscreen and hats and things to protect our skin. If we cut that young tree back now, branches would be exposed to the strong sun that have never seen the strong sun before and they will sunburn, and you could lose the tree from that. So I would recommend waiting until it goes dormant.

Farmer Fred

Now that is a hard thing to do, if you’ve ever done it, you’ve probably done demonstrations of cutting back bare root fruit trees in front of a crowd and it always gets gasps of horror. Whenever you take your pruners and cut a six foot stick back to a two and a half or three foot stick. Yes. And in Steve’s case, he’s going to be cutting off a lot of growth that had leaves and he’s going to feel really bad doing it. But he should.

Debbie Flower

He should. And what those leaves are doing for that tree right now is feeding the roots. It’s has no flowers or fruit on it that I can see. And so the the food that’s made in those leaves and that’s where plants make their food goes to a couple of places. One is the tips of those branches for new growth. And the other is the roots and a newly planted plant needs food to make roots. All plants need food to make roots. But it’s especially important when the plant is new to the garden, because it only has the roots that were in whatever container you bought it in. And that’s a very small amount and it’s also a very narrow sized root system and can make the plant unstable if the roots just stay in that little tiny area. So he wants the leaves to grow the leaves to make food send them to the roots, the root system to take off and then during dormancy this year. Now here’s the geek in me.

Farmer Fred

All right, go ahead. We can geek out.

Debbie Flower

As plants go dormant, deciduous plants - and a peach tree is deciduous - meaning they lose all of their leaves at one time in the year. And that will be in the fall. The plant will re-absorb all the good stuff it can out of those leaves and store it in the trunks and the roots. And so he’s not losing, he’ll lose some some stored food but a lot of that stored food will be absorbed back into the plant and go down into the roots before he takes that stem off. So it’s important to wait until all the leaves have fallen off, so that all that good food the plant has made, has had a chance to get down into the roots and strengthen the plant down there.

Farmer Fred

So full dormancy would be when all the leaves have fallen from the tree. But before the soil temperature is warm to the point where it starts breaking out new buds, here in the Central Valley of California that could be in February, other parts of the country might be a little later.

Debbie Flower

Right. And he doesn’t want to do it before then because it will stimulate growth in strange places and which might cause sunburn.

Farmer Fred

And maybe frost damage to to the new growth.

Debbie Flower

Yes, so full dormancy, all the leaves are gone. But before it warms up enough for the buds to break and new growth to begin.

Farmer Fred

Now remember, too, we’re talking about a tree that is only one year old or less. For people who have put in fruit trees that might be three years, five years old, and you didn’t cut it back by half when it was planted, it’s not a good idea to be cutting a tree that is that old, down to the knees. So what you’d want to do is start a process where you’re cutting it back from the top to get it to a height where you can manage it.

Debbie Flower

Yes, yes. And you never take more than one third of the canopy, one third to one half of the canopy, out of the tree in any one year. You’re going to take a big branch out and then wait another year and take another big branch out until you’ve brought it down to the level you you want it to be.

Pruning Fruit Trees: Thinning Cuts vs. Heading Cuts

Farmer Fred

Well this is a good opportunity to explain the difference between thinning and heading. So okay, are you talking about making a thinning cut or a heading cut?

Debbie Flower

Okay, so thinning is removing the branch from its point of origin, the place where it has grown out from a bigger branch, taking it all the way back. And there’s good ways to do that and bad ways to do that. But regardless of whether you do it well or not, it’s called thinning and it results in the natural shape, the plant will regrow into its natural shape. Heading cuts are used on things like hedges, their random cuts in the middle of the branch, or when we prune something into a geometric shape, a square or a circle, and those cuts come middle of the branch and they result in unnatural regrowth of that branch. A lot of buds below where you took the cut open all at once, and you get a very bushy, dense external growth on the plant. If you have done heading cuts to a shrub, go out and look at it. Pull the outside edge apart and you’ll probably see lots of branches in there but no more leaves. You tend to get a very dense foliage on the outer side. There will be lots of leaves on the outside, and no sun goes through to the inside. So when we’re talking about bringing an old tree back to, it’s a shorter shape, and I did this with an apricot in my yard, you want to do thinning cuts, you want to find the origin of that branch and cut it back to where it’s attached to another branch and then remove that. And that will allow other branches that are in my case below that branch and probably in your tree, they’d be below that branch as well, to grow and be strong. And then wait a year and take another one back to its origin.

Farmer Fred

Well this is an eye opener for me because I always thought that cutting one third of the tree back meant cutting one third of the height back and you’re talking about cutting out one third of the branches.

Debbie Flower

I choose the branches that are above where I want them to be and cut them back. You can either cut back to their origin or you can cut them back to a place where there is another branch that is one third to one half or more the diameter of the branch to which it is attached. This is hard to do verbally.

Farmer Fred

Do you want me to put on some tap dance music for you?

Debbie Flower

Really. So, when we’re cutting the peach tree, the young peach tree back to the knee height, we’re definitely doing a heading cut. Right?

Farmer Fred

But you’re talking about the old trees, right? Yeah, the older trees when you talk about taking out one third of the growth every year till you get it to the height that you want. Wouldn’t that mostly be heading cuts?

Debbie Flower

I don’t do it that way. Okay. All right, all right at the top of the plant, find the branch that’s that’s the tallest. I do this with even shorter plants and run my hand down till I find where it’s attached, or where it has a branch of its own. That is, one third to or greater in diameter, then The branch that I’m removing, and I take it at that point.

Farmer Fred

All right, so that would be a thinning cut.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, that is considered a thinning cut because the branch that is remaining, even though it’s attached to the branch I’m removing is big enough to take over as the leader. It has the hormonal strength to remain the leader.

Farmer Fred

You’re a good tap dancer. All right. All right. So that was a scenic bypass about older trees and how you can bring them back to a height where you don’t have to get on a ladder to be picking fruit or netting the tree.

After the Paywall: Irrigating young fruit trees; best practices for planting fruit trees; watch out for counterproductive “ancillary sales techniques” at nurseries.