Before you prune anything, I want you to understand two types of pruning cuts. What a difference to your fruit trees when you give up heading and get thinning!
Excerpt from ” Pruning Fruit Trees: A Beginners Guide“
Two Types of Pruning Cuts
Thinning is the removal of a whole shoot or branch, taking it back to its point of origin. The majority of your cuts should be thinning cuts, which makes for a lovely open tree – light pours in, and air flows.
Light thinning invigorates a tree, encouraging plenty of gentle new shoots and buds. A regular supply of new shoots provides options for renewal, a fruit tree’s version of insurance in future fruits.
Heading is to shorten a shoot, a branch or a leader. Use this type of cut to stop growth (e.g., the branch is too high or in the way of the mower), or redirect growth (e.g.,to send a branch outward) or to stimulate spurs on laterals.
Understand this: a headed back shoot, will fork. Heavy-handed heading stunts your tree and makes it dense and twiggy.
How To Prune Feijoas
If you prune your feijoa annually – you’ll find there’s not much to do. A lovely, feet on the ground job. I like to prune my feijoa’s right after harvest.
Don’t remove more than a third of the canopy. Stack up your pruning’s beside the tree so you can keep it real about how much you’ve taken off.
Clean Up First
Remove dead, damaged, crossing and vertical wood.
Remove all the low wood to give your feijoa a clear trunk, for healthy airflow and easy access to the fallen fruits which are so much better than the picked ones.
Mostly Thinning Cuts
Use mostly thinning cuts to produce an open canopy for good light penetration and access for bird and bee pollinators. You should be able to kind of see through the canopy to the other side, for a vague idea of what’s behind.
Thinning cuts stimulate a heap of replacement wood – important because feijoas fruit on the base of the new wood. A cycle of fresh wood coming on each season means you can keep your tree compact yet productive.
When choosing which shoots to thin, take the tallest shoots. This makes you a bit of a smarty pants – thinning and height/ width management all in one go! Remove also the leggy ones that have miles of bare wood before the foliage starts. The bare wood is unproductive and the fruits too far away.
Leave plenty of young new shoots for next years fruits.
A Little Heading
Finish off with a few heading cuts for height and width management. Take it easy on those heading cuts to avoid losing too many fruits next year.
Restoring overgrown trees
If you have an older, overgrown feijoa – you’ve got two possible roads before you.
- The slow, careful, considered one (which on the whole, is the way I go), of bringing the tree back over a few years. Only remove about 1/4 of the canopy at a time, this keeps the tree calm + steady + fruiting.
- The no mucking around approach – chop off the top of the feijoa to a height that’s reachable. There is a big impact on fruiting when you prune like this, so be prepared for a few years of light crops while the tree re establishes. Stop at that one dramatic chop – though its not always easy to as the tree wont look pretty! The more you prune the more the tree will shoot the following season, making for lots of tricky pruning decisions. In late spring/ early summer, do a bit more pruning to balance the tree. Use thinning cuts (of course!).
Both ways work. Which one suits your mood is the thing.
