Fruit trees are not a lawn to be mowed or a hedge to be sheared! So don’t let your gardener or your mow, blow and go guys touch (attack!) your fruit trees. All they know how to do is to shear things or hack and wack trees back to nothing! Rather, hire a qualified arborist to do your pruning, unless you want your trees and shrubs decimated!

The other day the Good News Tree Service crew went to a client’s house to prune their fruit trees. Unfortunately, the mowing crew, against the client’s wishes, had gotten to the fruit trees before we did.

Here is the pathetic sight that greeted us — two apple trees hacked back to stubs and denuded of all fruiting wood! In my many decades of pruning fruit trees, I have never seen anything like this before. I was horrified!

These tree butchers had cut off all of the fruiting wood that we had carefully nurtured for many years. It will take several years before these trees produce new fruiting wood, and until then, they will bear no apples. Needless to say, our client wasn’t very happy about this sad state of affairs.

The problem in many of these situations is that the mowing crew speaks little or no English. I hear this again and again from my clients. Thus, a language barrier exists between the homeowner and the crew doing the work. You are telling them one thing, and think you’re saying something else, and off they go. Yikes! Yes, you save a little money by hiring cheap labor, but in the long run, you risk losing money in other ways. So do your homework and hire the right people for the job who know what they are doing.

Here is what a well-pruned apple tree should look like: