| Pruning your citrus
trees Citrus are seldom pruned in the way that
deciduous fruit trees are. There simply isn't any need to. If they get shaded out by being
planted too close to a wall or fence, you will find that the shaded side will die back and
need to be pruned, but that's about all.
If they grow too large you can certainly pollard them, so
that they sprout from lower down. If you do this it needs to be done during their growing
season and it may then also be necessary to cut back some of the subsequent coppice shoots
or they grow too tall and take ages to mature to fruit bearing wood. A 'Lisbon' lemon cut
back by half, will be back bearing within one year.
After a few years any citrus tree will assemble a
collection of dead wood in its centre. This can be cut out or even left there! While your
citrus trees are young it is not very prudent to let them bear too heavily or else they
can be easily damaged, from the weight of too much fruit.
The pruning exception in the citrus tribe is the mandarin
that crops heavily in alternate years. By pruning it all over, which requires quite an
effort, you will get a heavy flowering in the poor year and so set more fruit. This is
quite against Mother Nature's plan, but as with all pruning is designed to trick her. This
is somewhat akin to the tourniquet technique that is applied to poorly flowering fruit
trees, olives and vines, so they are tricked into thinking their life is up or at least
their limbs are being throttled, where up they burst forth in that last ditch effort to
procreate. The all-over mandarin pruning or let's settle for 'clipping' rather than
'pruning' proves most beneficial. |
