More for the tree pruning archive. I managed to squeeze an hour in before the Lane’s Christmas outing to Man City v. Liverpool – just enough to finish an unnamed cooker that I started yesterday and start on the Bramley.

The cooker produced a few wonderful large fruit this year, following a hard prune the previous autumn to re-shape it(before my time). You can clearly see the response – lots of strong growth shoots all over it. It’s still lopsided with most growth to the right of the picture, but very accessible. I need to thin out the mass of new shoots, cutting back some completely, prune some for next year’s fruiting spurs and some as new branch leaders.

Here’s the tree before I started:

Halfway, and it seems plain that a large, horizontal branch is crowding the centre.

The end result. I’ve taken off a couple of badly positioned smaller branches, but I’ve tried to resist taking off much heavy wood because I don’t want it to put on loads of leafy growth again. We’ll see what happens. It still has loads of fat, promising fruit buds. Most of the new cuts visible facing the camera are where I’ve removed branch stubs from earlier pruning which had been left too long.

December 30, 2007