How to prune espalier apples

Espalier growing has been around for centuries possibly from before roman times, it was further developed in the middle ages as the way of disguising drab castle walls and as a space-saving way of growing fruit, the advantages of espalier are no less today than they were back then.

You can see how much fruit we can fit in a small area here, the espalier rows don't get any taller than this and that makes it really easy to prune and to net them and to pick the fruit

It's much easier to keep the birds off and you can actually fit four to six espalier apple trees in the area that you would normally have one large apple tree. That means you get more variety of fruit and you can spread your harvest out over a much longer period of time.

When pruning is espalier trees the most important thing to know is what to cut off and what not to.

This new growth, these one year old whips are the kind of wood we're going to be pruning today.

That's trying to make branches and leaves and it's not going to fruit.

These shorter, fatter fruiting Spears up here, most of them have fruit on them on this tree so it's fairly easy to tell and are not the stuff that we cut off. They are permanent fruiting spears and we're going to leave them because they won't grow back if you prune them off.

You can tell that they're fruiting spears because they're much shorter much closer to the original branch and they're a lot fatter they don't have pointy ends like these ones do and in this case, they're covered in fruit so it's fairly easy to tell.

When the trees are this big we don't want them to get any bigger we want them to produce fruit instead of leaves and wood. All the pruning is done in summer instead of winter now because summer pruning restricts the plant's growth and encourages fruiting whereas winter pruning encourages the tree to grow back faster and produce leaves and stems.

All of this growth is less than one year old, this is all from spring or summer and all needs to be pruned back to about the third leaf to encourage fruiting spares further down. So everything growing out towards the pads here away from the main trunk needs to be pruned off, this keeps the espalier nice and neat and along the fence line without it growing too far out. All this vertical growth you see in not going to produce fruit that's trying to make branches and we don't want branches here so that all gets pruned back to about the third leaf as well.

Generally, horizontal growth produces more fruit and vertical growth produces more branches so we're actually tricking the tree into thinking it's a lot older than it is by training it along this wise. It's a little bit like training a rose along horizontally so it flowers more. With the verticals, you can take them right that and prune them back there or if you've got a gap there where there are no spears you can leave a couple of leaves on there as well which will encourage them to fruit from the spear.