DON'T PRUNE YOUR CITRUS TREES like you do your Deciduous Fruit Trees! How to Prune Citrus

This is Cameron .

Welcome back to the busy Gardener channel .

Today , we are going to spend some time focusing on pruning citrus .

Let's get busy .

So when it comes to pruning Citrus , a lot of the concepts are similar as it is with pruning deciduous type trees , like you know , your plums and pears and all that kind of stuff in that .

You want to make sure that you're going for balance in the structure and you're wanting to remove any types of dead or diseased branching .

One reason why citrus is way different than those deciduous trees is that citrus grows a lot more like a bush you see here , it has a very low canopy .

It is almost like a hedge and something really important to look at and why a lot of commercial orchards or groves , citrus groves have the fruit and go and the branch and going all the way down as opposed to some of the more traditional skinny , you know , trunk in the middle and then having a canopy up high is that a bunch of the fruit grows really low on the tree , maybe the bottom two thirds of the tree will often have the bulk of the fruit .

And so it's ok to leave that skirt going all the way down or near within maybe a foot of the ground .

So that's one way it differs pretty significantly from pruning and keeping track of deciduous trees .

Citrus is essentially a hedge .

It's a bush , we train them up as trees , but in a lot of respects , they're just bushes and so you can come through and you can almost come in with hedge clippers and create some sort of thing .

Now , what is going to inform my pruning here has to do with keeping the overall grouping managed .

This is our eureka lemon .

We've got a regular Persian lime and then a pomona sweet lemon in the back .

Those two are really big , whereas the lime is a lot smaller .

I'm not entirely concerned about that because of where it's placed , it's placed with the southern facing exposure .

So I'm not concerned about this getting too shaded out and yet this eureka lemons wanting to take off .

So I might come through and check some of the height on here .

You don't have to worry about outward facing buds in the same way because the foliage just grows more as a shrub .

So really , you just come through and just wherever you want to see , he cuts made for height or width , you just make the I'm losing a little bit of fruit .

There are a few fruit on here , but you know , this thing is going to give me more lemons than I'm going to be able to use anyway .

And so if I lose a little bit of fruit doing summer pruning , ideally , you want to do it on a tree after the thing has already fruited .

So you don't want to come in and make drastic cuts on something that has tons of fruit hanging on it , but losing a few of the fruit at the top where I've got so much fruit still on the bottom , not a biggie at all with this one , another couple of lemons .

This is a good time to cut out any leaves that I see that are diseased or have any sort of pest issues .

This lemon has leaf miner that attacks , it's a little bug that comes and crawls and affects new foliage on citrus .

You see there so much beautiful foliage on here .

I'm not even worrying about treating it .

I used to come and spray all the leaves with spinosad , which is an organic substance that helps to kill any type of pests .

But you know , just cutting this out is easier than coming through and having to spray the entire tree and we've got so much wonderful foliage .

Still left leaf miner .

They come and create these little trails , little caterpillar or whatever it is .

A little moth comes and lays something on here .

So it affects this or maybe you can see the little trails on here can you see that one ?

Main reason why I like to keep my citrus a lot taller and why I'm going to allow them to grow taller .

I'm not going to check the height in the same way is because citrus fruit can hang on the tree for a lot longer .

So when that tree gets really , really tall , you're able to have it hold a lot of the fruit .

And so you're not going to become overwhelmed with the volume of fruit all becoming ripe within a two week period .

A lot of the citrus has a growing season of 23 , maybe even four months depending on the variety .

And so having a larger tree with more fruit on it is a great way to store that fruit , storing it on the tree .

Another reason is picking it , I'm not going to have to get on the ladder to pick this fruit .

It's because of the rind .

It's strong enough and hard enough to be able to use a citrus picker where you would never do something like that with a peach because it's too fragile to pick a fresh peach .

Could you imagine that a big claw coming down and getting it ?

What would happen to that peach or that nectar and that plum ?

Not a chance .

So I want those deciduous fruit no higher than I can reach .

But when it comes to citrus , you get as high as you can reach that citrus picker really is where you're able to grab that stuff .

Same goes for avocados .

So those trees because of the hang time and because of how hardy and strong the fruit themselves are , I'm going to allow these trees to grow a lot taller than I am .

Any of the deciduous stuff .

This lemon lime combo from another angle coming through and I see this Pomona sweet lemon has a bunch of leaf , minor activity on it .

So I'll just come and cut all that stuff off .

All right , our height is a lot more managed .

This eureka lemon is not running away as much took off a bunch of the leaf miner if I didn't have to keep coming back to the camera that would have been done in 23 minutes , really easy if you're lucky enough to live in a state where citrus can grow on its own .

This is a wonderful fruit .

A lot lower maintenance frankly than a lot of the other types of deciduous fruit that are out there as tasty as those are .

Citrus is a wonderful fruit to be able to grow in the winter time when everything else is dormant .

That's when citrus comes on .

So , really in this orchard , if you look around here , I've got fruit for almost the entire year .

We've got our summer fruit .

We have our spring fruit , we have our winter fruit , we have our fall fruit .

So we're really fortunate to be able to grow .

So much here in our climate .

OK .

This is a combo of our tangelo and our cocktail grapefruit hybrid .

And again , whenever you're doing a multi planting , you want to create balance within the planting .

So if you've got one tree that's more vigorous , you want to check its height or if you're seeing some sort of issues like we are here , we want to check this as well .

So remember , citrus is like a hedge .

So just go ahead and treat it like that .

And if you see any leaf minor activity , any type of pests , you just chop it off .

So I'm not trying to , I'm not trying to check the height on this as much this one because it's out of balance with its neighbor is what I'm wanting to bring the height down a little bit .

Um Just a couple more cuts .

Yeah , I think ready to go .

What do you think balanced looks good ?

One other thing to consider with this is that the eventual tree height of the citrus is a lot lower than a lot of the other deciduous trees that I have here .

The eventual height of the citrus is going to be maybe 12 ft , 10 to 12 ft if I let them grow fully out .

Whereas those deciduous even on like some of these a full sized apple is like 30 ft tall , semi dwarf is maybe 22 ft tall and a dwarf is 18 ft tall , way taller than I'm ever going to be able to manage where citrus is not going to grow all that tall on its own with some of these semi dwarf , which is really common in a lot of the home goods stores , Home Depot and that so I hope you enjoyed this quick video on pruning a few citrus and seeing some of the differences , things you ought to be looking out for .

These are different than deciduous trees .

They grow differently , they produce fruit differently and they're just kind of a totally different type of fruit .

And so you want to just feel ok about going through and creating a hedge type , bringing back some of that structure .

It's supposed to be bushy .

It's supposed to be like a , like a bush or a hedge as opposed to , you know , something that's very woody like this is like this nectar behind me here .

Anyway , if you like this video , I'd love for you to subscribe and hit the notification bell .

What questions do you have ?

What tips do you have when it comes to pruning citrus ?

Um Yeah .

Leave those in the comments below and whether you've got one tree in your orchard , 500 till next time .

Stay busy .