Pruning your tangerine tree helps maintain its health, shape, and productivity. While the specific cuts and goals can vary, understanding the correct technique is crucial to avoid damaging the tree.
Why Prune a Tangerine Tree?
Pruning serves several important purposes for citrus trees like tangerines:
- Remove Dead or Diseased Branches: This prevents the spread of disease and pests.
- Improve Air Circulation and Sunlight Penetration: This helps reduce humidity (lowering disease risk) and ensures light reaches inner branches for better fruit production.
- Shape the Tree: Maintain a desired size and structure for easier harvesting and management.
- Control Size and Vigor: Prevent the tree from becoming too large or unruly.
- Remove Crossing or Rubbing Branches: Prevent damage where branches chafe against each other.
When to Prune
The best time to prune most citrus trees, including tangerines, is typically after the main harvest in late winter or early spring, before new growth begins. Avoid heavy pruning in late summer or fall, as this can encourage new growth that may be damaged by cold weather. Light clean-up of dead or diseased branches can be done anytime.
Essential Pruning Tools
- Clean, sharp bypass pruners (for smaller branches)
- Loppers (for medium-sized branches)
- Pruning saw (for larger branches)
- Gloves
- Safety glasses
Always ensure your tools are clean and sharp to make clean cuts that heal quickly. You can disinfect tools between trees (or even between cuts on a diseased branch) using a solution of 1 part bleach to 9 parts water, or rubbing alcohol, to prevent spreading pathogens.
How to Make the Cut: The Correct Technique
Making the cut properly is vital for the tree's health.
Here's the correct approach:
- Identify the Cut Location: Look for the "branch collar." This is a slightly swollen area or ring of bark tissue where the branch attaches to the trunk or a larger branch.
- Position Your Tool: As citrus bark is thin and easily damaged, avoid nicking the bark.
- Make the Cut Correctly: Pruning cuts should always be made with the blade toward the tree so as to cut cleanly and avoid damage to the remaining branch. Cut just outside the branch collar.
- Avoid Cutting Flush: Branches should not be cut flush with the trunk or larger branch in order to preserve the branch collar. Cutting into the collar removes the tree's natural healing tissue, leaving a larger wound that is slow to close and vulnerable to pests and diseases.
- Example: When removing a side branch, find the collar where it meets the main branch or trunk. Make your cut at a slight angle away from the main branch, just outside the collar, ensuring the branch collar remains intact.
What to Prune
Focus on removing:
- Dead, damaged, or diseased branches.
- Suckers (vigorous upright growth from the base or rootstock below the graft union).
- Water sprouts (fast-growing, vertical shoots that often appear on upper branches).
- Branches that cross or rub against each other.
- Low-hanging branches that touch the ground.
- Branches that make the canopy too dense.
Table: Pruning Goals and What to Remove
| Goal | What to Look For & Remove |
|---|---|
| Improve Airflow/Light | Dense, crossing, or inward-growing branches |
| Tree Health | Dead, damaged, or diseased branches; suckers, water sprouts |
| Structure & Shape | Branches crossing/rubbing; low branches; overgrown sections |
| Pest/Disease Prevention | Dead/diseased wood; dense canopy promoting humidity |
Remember to step back periodically to assess the tree's overall shape as you prune. Moderate, regular pruning is generally better than infrequent, heavy pruning.
