This is the time of year when I stroll through my yard looking closely at the flowers on my fruit trees. Where are they? Are the flowers on branches that are growing anew right now, or on branches that grew last summer, or on older branches?
Are the flowers forming only at the branch tips? Are they forming up and down the entire sides of branches (like the Red Baron peach flowers in the photo above)? Are they forming on long branches or on short, stubby branches?
I recommend that you, too, have a look at your trees and ask these questions. Seeing the answers will inculcate the facts better than reading them in a book or on a website. And knowing the answers will allow you to predict where your fruit will be this summer, as well as guide your pruning.
To get you started, follow along with me as I look at where some of the fruit trees in my yard were making their flowers yesterday:
Here’s a related post you might like to read: “Don’t cut off the fruiting wood: Pruning lesson number one.”
(What about citrus, avocado, and other evergreen fruit trees? I’ll try to do separate posts on their flowering habits as their bloom seasons ramp up.)
All of my Yard Posts are listed HERE
as always, just in time to encourage me as a new-to-San Diego gardener! this time, with the fruit trees & how they form flowers helped me feel better about the plum that I thought might be suffering:) It’s just doing what plum trees do:) And, the reminder to check our peach trees in case they’re setting too much fruit for a branch to bear. We did have a huge branch break two seasons ago and worried the tree might not heal. It did:) Thanks, Greg!
What should I be doing for my raspberry bush right now? It no longer looks like a bush as it has died back but there are new shoots. Please advise.
Hi Martha,
My own simple raspberry pruning method is to cut off anything that is dead. I usually do this twice per year, at the end of summer and now in late winter.
See more details in my raspberry growing post: https://gregalder.com/yardposts/growing-raspberries-in-southern-california/
Great post. That’s about what my trees look like. I’ve actually started thinning fruit on some of the peaches and nectarines. The plums and apricots are nowhere near that stage yet and still mostly dormant. The cherries have just started to wake up.
There are NO flowers on my just planted Gold Kist apricot tree that got plenty of chill. Last year when I bought it, it only had one apricot. i had it in a 10 gallon pot with nice mix and sun for a year. Maybe I should have given it more langbeinite. Is it too late? It isn’t completely leafed out yet. The neighbor’s tree has apricot
blossoms already.
Hi Laurie,
Flowers grow before leaves on apricots so if you don’t see flowers now, you won’t. My experience with Gold Kist is that it’s not as consistent as some others, such as Blenheim. I planted a Gold Kist tree at my mom’s house about ten years ago and it didn’t do much until about year five. Then it produced an abundance of apricots. But the production has not been consistent since. This year, for example, there’s a total of a handful of fruit on it.
Do you have any tips for pruning a seasoned or mature pomegranate tree?
Hi Teri,
There are so many ways you can prune pomegranates since they’re so tough and forgiving. I prune one of mine into a tree form and another like a bush. I think that the only thing you should do is keep it down to the size you want.