When is the best time to prune walnuts?

Walnut pruning time and season

Spring pruning: Spring pruning refers to pruning performed after the walnut tree sprouts. The earlier the pruning time, the better. Spring pruning is suitable for young trees, grafted trees in the first two years, and walnut trees with weaker tree vigor.

Summer pruning: Summer pruning is carried out in conjunction with grafting, and is best completed from late May to the end of June. Pruning is mainly focused on thinning out the lower branches. It is best not to shorten the branches during summer pruning.

Autumn pruning: It is carried out after walnuts are harvested and before leaves fall (early October to early November). The main purpose of pruning is to promote tree balance, ease the growth trend of walnut trees, and increase the number of branches.

Winter pruning: The best time to prune fruit trees is from the time the ground freezes to before budding. Although pruning at this time will cause bleeding, the tree has entered a dormant period and only loses water but not nutrients.

Walnut pruning methods and steps

Pruning: Walnut has weak germination and branching abilities, the branches in the crown are sparse, and there is a lot of ineffective space. Therefore, it is necessary to appropriately prune the branches to expand the crown, promote branching, enrich the inner chamber, cultivate branch groups, and increase the fruiting area.

Pruning: The method is to cut off part of the perennial branches, and when pruning back, cut off the weak parts to stimulate the plant to sprout strong new shoots; and the growth of the back half of the branch group left behind also turns from weak to strong due to the improved nutritional conditions and light conditions.

Thinning: For some overcrowded branches that can neither be cultivated into backbone branches nor into fruiting branches, they should be thinned out in time. The objects of walnut thinning are mainly dry branches, diseased and insect-infested branches, crossed branches, overlapping branches and overcrowded branches.

Bud carving: Before budding in spring, make a cut above the bud where branches are needed according to the shaping requirements. This can stimulate branching. Make a cut above the branch to stimulate the branch to become more vigorous.

Bud removal: After sprouting in spring, a large number of new buds will sprout from the main trunk, central trunk, or large branches on the main branches after thinning or bud cutting. Some of them cannot be used later. For these unusable new buds, all of them will be removed from the base.

Pinching: Pinching is generally carried out in May and June, which is suitable for the cultivation of main branches and fruiting branches. The long branches, upright branches and leggy branches inside the crown should be pinched in time to control the length when there is space to cultivate branch groups.

Precautions for pruning walnuts

Walnut trees are very nutritious when they are young trees. Pruning management at this stage should focus on cultivating the main trunk, while retaining the main branches and auxiliary branches. Timely pruning should be carried out for thin branches, dense branches, and overgrown branches, and more fruiting branches should be left in the crown.

For upright, vigorous growing branches, they should be flattened and then slowly released to ease the production trend of the branches and leaves and encourage them to become fruit-bearing branches.