Pruning the Navel Orange Tree

This weekend it really warmed up.  As I walked by our citrus trees, especially the navel orange, I could vaguely smell the fragrance of orange blossoms.  What do you know?  The trees were beginning to bloom.  Not a lot, but in a week or two, the trees will be covered in blooms and I'll want to pull up a chair beside the trees and just enjoy the aroma.

While I was thinking about the trees, I made a mental note that I needed to research how to prune citrus trees.  You see, the fruit from the navel orange tree is so heavy that it caused a couple of branches to break this year.  Other branches that didn't break became so heavy that the limbs bent over and much of the fruit touched the ground and ended up rotting.  I want to see if I can keep that from happening this year.

As if on cue, my son, Russ, who is in the last semester of his senior year at LSU and majoring in Horticulture, sent me an email that stated the following:

We went out to Burden a couple weeks ago with the fruit specialist Dr. Johnson and pruned citrus and then last week we pruned peaches and table grapes/muscadines.  I learned alot.  Here was the homework for the class.  Thought you would want to read it. 

How to prune a citrus tree.  A rule of thumb is to cut what is necessary, then what is needed, and finally what is impossible.  First, prune everything below the graft line because those shoots are the root stock Poncirus trifoliata which is thorny and produces sub-par, non-ideal fruit.  Next, lift the skirt. That means cut branches that are growing down to the ground.  Prune away branches from your pants pocket down to keep the bottom of the tree open.  Next, focus on pruning any shoots that are growing straight up or any exceptionally tall shoots that you wouldn't be tall enough to pick fruit from anyway. Of course, prune away dead or decaying branches.  Finally, prune some branches from the middle of the tree so that you can somewhat see your partner on the other side of the tree.  Basically, you are trying to thin out the tree to open it so picking fruit will be less of a hassle.  

So I followed the instructions in the bolded paragraph above and here's how the navel orange turned out:

I realized immediately that I should have taken a 'before' photo.  Suffice it to say that pruning the navel really opened things up.  The cows enjoyed my pruning exercise as well!

Russ does a lot of freelance landscaping and told me that he pruned a lady's citrus last year and that she remarked to him that she noticed an increase in the production following the pruning.  The tangerine trees were pruned right after we picked all the fruit off of them.  They are nicely shaped and seem to be doing well. We'll see how the navel orange does after its "haircut."  It'll definitely be easier to harvest in December.