Fruit Tree Pruning with Peter Coppin at North Perth Community Garden

Guest presenter Peter Coppin is a freelance consulting horticulturist with 40 years experience with fruit and nut trees in Western Australia. Peter kindly donated his time and expertise for the North Perth Community Garden Group. June 2015.

Notes:
– Love his awkward sense of humour!
– Spend good money on decent secateurs and a saw as they are your main tool and you avoid tennis elbow.
– Listerine is best to avoid tree diseases. Read up on it and you’ll never put it in your mouth again.
– Any pruned stem larger than your thumb should be treated.
– Recommends getting Pruning for Fruit by Bruce Morphett but ignore the espalier section because these books are not written with Western Australia in mind. He goes deeper into it in video 7.
– Adult scales are harder to handle and when the eggs hatch they eat their parents body.
– Overall pruning stunts growth. During winter while all leaves are off you think nothing is happening but there is a lot of hormonal activity. So removing leaves during dormancy does a lot to invigorate it.

– Science of nutrition distribution.
– Best way to treat all woody plants is regular light summer pruning once they are the shape you want. Does not recommend winter pruning.
– Every cut you make must fall into 1,2,3 – 1: Purely size and shape. Saw cut first. 2: Species comes next. Fairing and fruiting. 3: Holistic look.
– If you have three branches coming out, cut the middle one so the tree is opened out. Keep splitting them into 2s as they grow. Talks anatomy and gives us pruning examples, etc.
– Talks about climate change and how it affects the trees.
– Do most your pruning after flaring and then drown it in copper spray.
– A spur is a cluster of flower buds.
– For height there will be a bully and a runt so first cut the smallest one at the tip and then cut the other ones at the same height to equalise things.

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