Excerpt from my little pruning book ” Pruning Fruit Trees: A Beginners Guide“
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 (as in Bob’s beautifully pruned feijoa above). This is especially helpful in high rainfall or humid climates to assist with healthy airflow. It also makes it a lot easier to access fallen fruits which are so much better than the picked ones.
Mostly Thinning Cuts
Use mostly thinning cuts to produce an open canopy, allowing 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 good vigour and 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 (my preference), of bringing the tree back over a few years. Use thinning cuts to 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 – not always easy though because the tree wont look pretty! The more you prune off, 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!).
