Pick and Write [Agricultural Word]👉#05

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For pick and write contest I'll pick "Pruning" and I'll be explaining a common misconception about pruning. Most people think the more branches you take off, the better for your trees, when it’s really not true.

When you take off too many branches, you’re taking the tree’s food factory away because trees need leaves to feed themselves and make energy. If they don’t have enough leaves, they can’t generate what they need for survival or to even fight disease that could stop the tree from growing or even kill it. This is really simple to understand, but still some mess this up.

There is something called the one third rule or you can also call it one quarter rule. Either one, you’re not to take off more than a certain percentage of the crown all at once. But how many people measure this before they start cutting?

What typically happens is that the tree goes into shock and attempts to compensate for the lost branches by producing weak, fast growing shoots everywhere. These new branches are useless and a form of desperation to recover from the lost branches, but they now make the tree look worse than it did when you started.

The large pruning wounds are also entry points for fungi and bugs. A tree that has excess stress cannot properly seal these wounds. Some trees will just never recover from poor pruning. They will try to thrive for another a season or two and then eventually die.

The problem comes from how some think of the pruning concept. People tend to think of pruning in the same way we think of going for a haircut. Even that logic is actually a misconception, a myth, cutting your hair more won't let it grow more or grow less and the Trees don’t also work like this. Once you have damaged the tree, there is no undoing that damage, all you can do is wait and see if the tree will continue to grow, if not, you're better off uprooting it, preparing your soil and planting again.

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