How to Prune a Peach Tree: Winter & Summer Pruning Tips

Peach trees are vigorous growers. Without regular pruning, they can quickly become an overcrowded mess! Those long, wispy branches might look beautiful now, but once they're loaded with peaches, they can become weighed down and even break.

Whether your peach tree is young or old, proper pruning is essential for keeping it healthy and at a manageable height. Even a mature peach tree can benefit from regular pruning to improve its shape and encourage better fruit production.

I'm going to walk you through how to prune a peach tree, including why summer pruning is just as important as getting the shape right in winter. And, with my YouTube video tutorials, you’ll be able to see exactly how it’s done! 

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A Fruitful Future

Dreaming of baskets overflowing with juicy, homegrown peaches? A single peach tree can potentially yield 150 to 200 lbs of peaches per season! But before you start counting your harvests, make sure you've got the basics covered with our guide on how to grow a peach tree.

When the time comes to give your orchard a little extra TLC, check out our tips for fertilizing fruit trees and using dormant oil to help protect against pests and diseases. With a little care and patience, you'll be enjoying a fruitful future filled with delicious peaches!

The Importance of Pruning Peach Trees

Unlike apples that tend towards biennial fruiting (a big crop one year and a smaller crop the next), peach trees usually produce at a consistent rate from year to year. You can kind of guarantee that, as the tree grows, you’ll just keep getting rewarded more and more if you keep it healthy.

And to do that, you need to prune and shape it properly, starting when the tree is young. If you start out wrong, it is really difficult to correct a peach tree later on.

Peach trees are also vigorous growers. Under good growing conditions, they can put on two to three feet of new growth in a single season! Without regular pruning, all that growth can quickly create a dense canopy with branches blocking out sunlight, competing for space, and increasing the damp, crowded conditions that encourage disease.

Peach trees produce fruit primarily on wood that grew during the previous season, so maintaining healthy new growth is especially important. Pruning helps balance that new growth with a strong framework of branches capable of supporting a heavy harvest.

Pruning Tools

I recommend investing in high-quality tools for your garden and orchard! You’ll need a sharp pair of bypass pruners and a blade sharpener for pruning smaller branches, along with loppers for larger branches. 

Always keep your tools sharp and clean. Be sure to disinfect them after cutting away diseased wood.

How to Prune a Peach Tree

I recently made videos and blog posts on How to Prune an Apple Tree and How to Prune a Cherry Tree. Reading the comments, I saw many people were asking if the same methods apply to peach trees. The answer to that question is that some of the same pruning methods apply, and some don’t.

Apple trees are often trained around a central leader, but peach trees should NEVER, under any circumstances, be pruned using the modified central leader method! Instead, they should ALWAYS be pruned into an open center shape!

Imagine a goblet made of branches extending outwards to create an open space in the middle to catch the sunshine. You never want the center of a peach tree to close up!

You also want to keep peach trees relatively short with a lower center of gravity. You should be able to prune, manage, and harvest them from the ground without relying on tall ladders. 

Open Center Pruning on Peach Trees

The most important thing to remember is that we're trying to encourage outward growth rather than upward growth. We want to create a foundation with one layer of strong main branches spreading away from the center of the tree.

Pro-Tip: Before making any cuts, make sure you understand the difference between thinning cuts and heading cuts. Thinning cuts remove an entire branch at its point of attachment, while heading cuts shorten a branch to a selected bud or length. For detailed instructions on making the different types of cuts, read How to Prune Fruit Trees With the Four Essential Cuts.

Here's how to prune into an open center:

1. Select Your Main Branches - On a young peach tree, identify three or four strong, well-spaced branches growing outward from the trunk on basically one plane. These will become your main structural branches, also called scaffold branches. Look for branches with wide attachment angles and enough space between them to develop without rubbing or crowding one another.

2. Remove the Central Leader - Once you've selected your scaffold branches, remove the main central leader above them with a releadering cut to establish the open center shape. 

3. Remove Unnecessary Upright Growth - Look for vigorous branches growing straight upward and remove them with thinning cuts, especially those that could become the dominant leader. Also, prune off upright growth that would eventually fill in the open center.

4. Remove Inward-Growing Branches - Any branches growing in toward the middle of the tree should be pruned off.

5. Remove Diseased Branches - Remove all dead, damaged, dying, or diseased growth.

6. Remove Crossing and Overlapping Branches - Look for branches growing directly on top of one another or crossing paths. As the branches become heavier with leaves and fruit, they can rub together, damaging the bark and creating openings for disease. Choose the better-positioned branch and remove the one causing interference.

7. Remove Branches That Are Too Low - Branches growing close to the ground can eventually droop even lower when loaded with peaches. Remove branches growing below knee height to keep fruit and foliage off the ground.

8. Balance the Tree - If one branch is growing significantly longer or taller than the others, use a selective heading cut above an outward-facing bud to reduce length and encourage the growth outward, not upward. This helps maintain a balanced, spreading shape rather than allowing one branch to dominate. This is particularly important because peach branches can be long and flexible. Once they're loaded with fruit, those branches naturally bend downward and risk breakage.

9. Step Back and Evaluate - With your goal in mind, walk around the tree and look at its overall structure. This may help you identify branches you still need to prune off. Pro-Tip: You generally want to prune off a maximum of 30% of the overall growth of the tree or less (dead, diseased, and dying branches don’t count towards the 30%).

It's tempting to leave every branch because you want as many peaches as possible. Trust me, I understand! But sometimes removing a branch now means better sunlight, healthier growth, and stronger fruit production in the years ahead.

How to Summer Prune Peach Trees

One thing I want you to understand is that winter pruning and summer pruning serve very different purposes. Both help maintain a healthy, productive tree, but we're focusing on different types of growth depending on the season.

Late winter to early spring, while your peach tree is dormant and before vigorous new growth begins, is a common time for major structural pruning. This is when we establish the open center shape, remove competing branches, make larger cuts to develop a strong framework, maintain productive fruiting wood, and control excessive height. 

Peach trees can grow so quickly that the beautiful open center you created during winter pruning starts filling in again by midsummer, and that’s where summer pruning comes in. Follow these steps to prune your peach tree in summer:

1. Timing - There’s only about a one-month window to prune peach trees in the summer, and that is from late June to late July. Pruning outside of that window can stimulate growth instead of reducing it.

2. Reopen the Center - Start by looking into the middle of your peach tree. You'll probably notice new shoots growing inward and upward, filling the space you worked so hard to create during winter pruning. Prune out selected shoots growing into the center to restore that open goblet shape.

3. Remove Competing Growth - Focusing now on the outer limbs, remove unnecessary shoots that are growing up into other branches, while keeping well-positioned growth that can contribute to future fruit production. Keep in mind that you should only prune off up to 15-20% of the canopy when summer pruning. Pro-Tip: Not every upright shoot needs to go! Peach trees fruit primarily on the previous season's growth, so be selective rather than stripping away all the new shoots.

4. Check for Overlapping Branches - Next, look at the outer edges of the tree and prune off branches that will eventually rub together or shade one another. Some branches may appear well-spaced now, but once they're loaded with peaches, they'll bend downward and could overlap with the branches below them. To get a better idea of which branches will compete, gently pull branches downward to see how they might hang when carrying fruit. 

5. Clean Up Your Prunings - Once you're finished, gather the branches and leaves you've pruned off and remove them rather than leaving piles of prunings beneath the tree. If you leave them beneath your peach tree, you invite disease and create a highway for pests like aphids, ants, and white flies to come in.

Supporting Heavy Branches

Peach trees can produce an unbelievable amount of fruit, and all that weight can cause branches to bend or even break. When visiting a peach orchard here in Michigan, the 85 year-old orchardist, Marvin, showed me one of the coolest tricks. 

Marvin places simple wooden posts beneath heavily loaded branches to help hold them up. What's even more interesting is that these supports help maintain the tree's open-center shape as the branches grow outward.

Over time, the branches develop a beautiful, spreading form while the middle of the tree stays open to sunlight. You don't need anything fancy to do this! Just make sure your supports are sturdy, secure, and positioned so they don't damage the bark.

To see examples, watch this video about how Marvin grows peaches in his orchard.