Winter Tree Care for Fruit Trees

The health of one’s fruit trees may be complicated and very hard to diagnose. Fruit tree injury or death can result from incorrect winter tree care care the prvious season or weather conditions. Your fruit tree might die in the winter simply because you over-fertilized it in the summer time. It might die in the winter due to you incorrect or over watering in the spring. It might be injured by intense cold in the winter and die in the summer. There are no autopsies for fruit trees so learning is basically trial and error. Studying how you can correctly provide winter tree care is essential to their health all year long.
Winter tree care for your fruit trees starts in the fall. If you want the fruit trees to flourish, they have to actually get strong in the winter to stay powerful enough to have the ability to bear fruit within the spring. This means you do not want to do anything within the fall which will promote growth, like pruning or fertilizing. Following a couple of easy winter tree care practices will help your fruit trees through the winter dormant period and make sure they have the strength for spring flowering and fruiting.

• Continue to water your fruit trees well into October. You would like your fruit trees to go into the winter months having a great water supply. Make certain you water 2-3 inches every time to ensure that water can penetrate the root zone of the fruit trees.
• Rake away any fallen leaves to stop leaf generated illnesses and to eliminate a location for rodents to live.
• Don’t fertilize your tree. Fertilized trees continue to develop and actually, young fruit trees will take longer to mature and bear fruit if fertilized. This really is because they’ll lack winter hardiness since the fertilizer will prompt them to continue to develop in the winter when fruit trees ought to be dormant.
• Manage insects. If you had tent caterpillars or other insects that must crawl up the tree to lay eggs get some tanglefoot and you will have few or no problems in the spring.
• In the event you live in an extremely cold climate, you will want to protect your fruit trees from sun dmage that happens in later winter while the roots are still frozen. Sun can warm the bark during the day, but cells die at night causing harm to the tree. Tree wrapping is essential through the first years until bark thickens. Wrap the lower five to six feet of the trunk or to the first branch. Remove tree wrap in the spring after snow melt.
• The significant winter tree care job is pruning. Winter is a great time to prune trees and fruit trees ought to only be pruned throughout this dormant season to stop disease and infection. Keep in mind that your fruit trees should stop growing for a period of time in order to strengthen prior to winter. In case your fruit trees are not permitted this hardening-off period they might suffer winter injury. So, make certain you prune your fruit trees toward the end of winter.