How to Maintain Your Fruit Trees This Spring

Caring for your fruit trees and maintaining them over the spring can lead to great benefits when summer rolls around. Fasttreeremovalatlanta.com assists homeowners in carefully pruning, feeding, and protecting your trees against pests and disease. This care means your fruit trees will produce larger and healthier crops.

While pruning is often performed on a dormant tree, there are benefits to spring pruning. When the tree begins to sprout leaves you can see which branches will be productive and which ones are dead. Deadwood is unable to produce any fruit and should be clipped off. Pruning at the optimal time limits how much trees grow and allows them to dedicate more energy to producing fruit. Visit fasttreeremovalatlanta.com/when-tree-pruning-cutting-emergency-removal-atlanta-ga for the best time to prune and cut your trees.

This article will highlight how to prevent contamination, pests, and best practices for applying fertilizer this spring so your fruit trees develop optimally.

New Seasons Bring Fruit Tree Contamination

Diseased leaves and rotting fruits can spread contamination during the new season. It’s important to get rid of any leaves or fruit left over from under the fruit tree at the start of spring. Spraying dormant oil early in the spring, before new shoots and buds can appear, helps to reduce scale and mites.

Spring is the opportune time to set insect traps for insects. One idea of a simple trap would be to cover a red ball that looks like an apple with petroleum jelly. Codling moths can be trapped with a liquid trap made up from a mixture of a banana, a cup of sugar, and a cup of vinegar. Hang the mixture from an apple tree to keep the moths at bay.

Apply Dormant Oil in Early Spring

A dormant oil spray is a refined petroleum product mixed with water. The spray is applied to shrubs and trees to control levels of aphids and spider mites, as well as scale. Dormant oils eliminate pests through suffocating them. A dormant oil spray should be applied as close to the bud breaking period as possible. When they are applied properly, the oil clogs the pores the mites and insects use to breath.

When using a dormant oil spray, timing is everything. They need to be applied before the tree shows signs of coming out of dormancy (before the buds break). It’s not effective to spray the dormant oil during late winter as the pests they work to stop aren’t actively respiring, and are not going to fall victim to the suffocating effects of the oil.

Fertilize New and Established Trees

A vital piece of care for new fruit trees is to establish them better in their environment. After a fruit tree becomes established, they pretty much take care of themselves. To get started with this process the first step is to plant them in the right planting site. It is also a good idea to fertilize new trees in the growing season to give them all the nutrients they need when they are most needed. The ideal time to fertilize trees would be the growing season – which is from around when the buds break in early spring to July. If you wait too long to fertilize them it could cause the tree to grow when it should be getting ready for winter. Growth that is pushed too late in the season like this is also more likely to be injured by winter.

Fruit Trees Depend on Your Care

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that your fruit trees are living organisms, even if they aren’t running around or talking. They respond to the actions of humans. It’s crucial that you pay attention to how they are developing because it allows you to also understand what your tree needs, along with how it behaves and responds. When you know more about your tree, it allows you to properly respond to encourage growth and fertility. A tree that is taken care of will live much longer than a human, and will produce plenty of fruit.