Wherever we’ve lived we’ve planted many trees but never fruit trees mainly because of lack of space. But we’ve made up for it during the last four seasons. I’ve checked on the internet about pruning of course but advice is often over complicated. We just want an attractive tree to look at that gives a reasonable amount of fruit
We’ve just picked a good amount of Mirabelles from a tree into its 3rd season and feel tempted to prune it now but the advice is to prune either mid summer or early spring?
You could say that we’re mid-summer? Certainly plums and cherries shouldn’t be pruned in the winter because of some disease susceptibility or other (forget which but one of the gardening experts will know). Mirabelles are great and are, in fact, pretty well the only plum that thrives here (Normandie). Apples and pears on the other hand, and figs, marvellous!
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Silver leaf - mind you the French seem to ignore this. They are always out there in January onwards pruning their plum trees in all the huge orchards around Agen.
In case you don’t know, Agen prunes are the best in the world!
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If I were you I’d prune now (lightly) start by cutting out dead wood then start to structure cutting out most of the water shoots that are crowding the center. Young plants lightly prune.
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With mirabelles, like cherries, the advice I received from French gardeners was to prune straight after the harvest. Obviously, where you live in France might affect when exactly that is. In the Lorraine, it was often quite late into August (at least in the garden we had there), whereas in the Auvergne it was much earlier (sunny, exposed valley)
We didn’t prune last year so I don’t think there are any water shoots. We do want to limit the height which at the the moment is about 10 foot so I would lik to keep to that height if possible. I understand that it’s okay to cut about one third off each branch so that would mean cutting about 3ft off. As it’s grown so fast the stems would only be about 1 cm thick. Is that light pruning? I think our main problem is that as usual we’ve planted our trees too close together. The tree is touching a mulberry tree which is also fast growing and will need hard pruning next spring. So there is not much room for it to spread
Anyway the job is done. It’s a very vigorous tree so I can’t have done too much damage. So thanks again for all the good advice which was very helpful
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