How to Prune a Persimmon Tree Without Cutting Off Next Year's Fruit

Where the fruit actually comes from

This is the one piece of persimmon knowledge that saves crops. Flowers are not carried on the old wood and not on the one-year shoot itself. In spring, the buds near the tip of last season's growth push out short new shoots, and the flowers appear on those new shoots. So the crop depends on shoot tips that grew last year and are still there this spring.

That makes the standard fruit-tree habit of heading back the ends of the shoots, which works well on some trees, actively destructive here. If you go round the tree in winter shortening every shoot by a third, you are cutting off precisely the buds that would have produced the fruiting shoots. The tree responds with vigorous vegetative growth, looks healthy, and gives you nothing. Do this for several years running and people conclude their tree is simply a shy bearer.

The rule that follows is simple: prune by removing whole branches at their base, not by shortening the ends of the ones you keep. Thin out, do not head back. Heading cuts are reserved for two jobs only, shortening a young tree's leader to force branching, and cutting back an over-long limb that is threatening to break, and in the second case you accept that you lose that limb's crop for a year.

The buds toward the tip of a one-year shoot are the fruitful ones; the buds toward its base are usually vegetative. That is why a shortened shoot grows leaves and no flowers.

When to prune

Do the main pruning in late winter, while the tree is dormant and the framework is visible, but after the worst cold has passed. Persimmon wood is not especially hardy at fresh cuts and pruning in the depths of winter invites dieback at the cut. Once the buds have begun to swell you have left it too late and you will knock them off working in the tree.

There is a second, much smaller job in summer. After the early fruit drop, take out water shoots, those vertical whips that shoot straight up out of the top of a limb. Removing them in summer keeps light in the tree and does not stimulate the regrowth that winter removal would. Do not do anything else in summer.

Never prune a persimmon hard in autumn. Cuts made then do not seal before the cold, and the tree is still moving reserves back down out of the leaves. Broken limbs are the exception: repair a break whenever it happens, cutting back to a clean collar.

What to cut, in order

Work through the tree in a fixed order rather than wandering round it. Standing back every few cuts is worth more than any rule, because a persimmon is easy to over-thin: strip too much of the canopy and the remaining fruit is exposed to sunscald and the tree replies with a forest of water shoots.

1. Dead, damaged and diseased wood Take these first, cutting back to the raised collar at the base of the branch without leaving a stub. On a brittle-wooded tree there is usually more broken wood than you expected, especially where a limb tore rather than snapped clean.
2. Anything growing inward or crossing Branches heading back through the center, or rubbing on a neighbor, cost you nothing to lose. Remove them whole at the point of origin.
3. Narrow crotches A branch leaving the trunk at a tight angle, with bark folded into the join, is the joint that splits under a crop. On this tree that matters more than on most. Remove one of the two competing limbs while it is small enough to be an easy decision.
4. Thin the crowded areas, whole branches only Aim for enough space that light reaches the inside of the canopy. Remove entire branches at their base. Do not shorten the ones you leave; their tips are the crop.
5. Shorten anything that is going to break A long, thin, over-extended limb will snap when loaded. Cut it back to a strong side branch pointing the way you want growth to go. Accept that you have removed that limb's fruit for the coming season.
6. Take the water shoots out Vertical whips from the top of limbs are unproductive and shade the fruiting wood. Cut them flush at the base rather than shortening them, which just produces several in place of one.

Training a young tree

The first four years decide whether you will ever be able to reach the fruit and whether the tree will hold a crop without splitting. Because the wood is brittle and the tree naturally runs upright, the goal is a low frame of three or four wide-angled scaffold limbs, evenly spaced round the trunk and separated vertically by eight to twelve inches (20-30 cm) rather than all arising from one point.

Head the leader at planting to about three feet (90 cm) to force low branching. In the following winter, choose your scaffolds from the shoots that grew, keeping those that leave the trunk at a wide angle, and remove the rest entirely. Wide angles are stronger; a branch at forty-five degrees or more will carry fruit that a narrow one will drop on the ground with half the limb attached.

Once the frame is set, stop training and switch to thinning only. Every winter after that, the job is the same short list: dead wood out, crossing wood out, crowded areas thinned by whole branches, tips left alone.

Renewal and the on-and-off years

Persimmons drift into alternate bearing, a heavy crop one year and almost nothing the next, and the heavy crop is what causes the empty year: the tree spends everything on fruit and sets no fruit buds. Pruning alone will not fix this, but pruning plus thinning the crop will damp it down over two or three seasons.

In an off year, prune lightly. The tree already has few fruiting shoots and removing wood removes more of them. In an on year, prune slightly harder and thin the fruit hard in early summer, because reducing the load is what buys you a crop the following year.

Old, congested trees can be brought back, but slowly. Take no more than a fifth of the canopy in any one winter and spread the job over three or four years. Cutting an old persimmon back hard in one go produces a mass of water shoots, a large area of sun-exposed bark that scalds, and several years with no fruit at all. Record what you removed each winter and how the following crop turned out; on a tree with a two-year rhythm, that record is the only way to see whether your pruning is helping.