The skeleton cut … update

Last February we took drastic action with one of the mandarin trees. It was not looking great, and the center was so packed with branches and twigs it was hard to get in there to thin it out.

So we did this to it …

Nine months later, and this is the tree now …

Now we can prune it to to thin it out. We had to forego ant fruit for this year but we have five other mandarin trees, so not a problem! Hopefully next year the fruit from this tree will be bigger and better!

Now that we’ve done this to one tree successfully, I’m much more confident in using the same technique on some of the other trees. There are a handful of orange trees that I think would really benefit from this. There are also a couple of the other mandarin trees that have got too bushy, and so are now producing small fruit … time to get the chainsaw out again!!