 Hi, I'm Kathy. I'm the fruit project manager at NDSU's Carrington Research Extension Center and I'm going to prune this tree today. I just have three tools. I have my loppers, which is just nice little 24 inch loppers. I have a folding saw, a nice little pole saw, and then I have my hand pruners. They're bypass hand pruners and I use them every day. I love them and I would encourage you to get the best that you can buy. You should have these for the rest of your life and even though they're a bit expensive when you first buy them, a good quality tool is just a life saver when you're pruning. Also, in addition, a sharpener. You want to keep your tools sharp so keep a sharpener around for your tools. Hey, I wanted to show you how to sharpen your tools. Here you have your pruners and this is your cutting blade right here and on that little angle there, you will take your sharpener and you run it along there. Just going along with the angle that's there, do it a few times and then turn your pruners over and on the flat side of the blade, make a very shallow rub, just rub very shallowly along there to take off any burrs and then your pruners are ready. This is my neighbor's tree and it has had kind of a hard life. It has some low branches that have been cut off at the ends. I just want to show you here that this would be what we would call a stub in that there's no active growth here, there's no active buds for new growth and it's just going to continue to have little tiny shoots come from it and we're just going to remove this. My neighbor wants to be sure that he continues to get apples from this tree so we can't do all the corrections at once but we will do some of the corrections today and then maybe continue on next year with them. The first thing you should do is get rid of the things you really don't like about your tree, you want to remove all the branches that are heading downward, you want to remove the branches that are straight upward or they point into the tree, anything that annoys you at first. So let's get rid of these low branches so that my neighbor can mow around his tree a little bit better. I'm going to start right over here. This is the area that I'll be cutting on this branch and I want you to notice that there's a branch collar, the branch kind of curves out kind of like a funnel shape where it comes down and then becomes narrow. That's where you want to cut. You don't want to cut close to the main trunk because you're cutting too close, you're cutting off too much tissue and it'll have to heal too much. But if you cut right here, it's right at the junction of where the wide collar is and where the branch is, just like that. I'm going to take off this whole branch, it's very low, bothers my neighbor when he mows and it's been cut up pretty well. It's not going to grow very normally anymore. First I'm going to cut this branch shorter because where I really want to cut is right here, but I don't want to let the bark tear. When you cut a bigger branch it can fall down and then you just don't want that bark to tear because it'll leave a big wound, disease could get in there or something like that. I'm just going to cut these off shorter so that there's less weight on this big branch. So here I go. And then I'm going to cut this big branch off. I'm still going to make a cut underneath, it breaks the bark so that then it won't tear. And I'm making sure to stay outside of the branch collar area. There you can see we've made a pretty nice cut. So that's what we say when we don't leave stubs because they will die and it's a source of infection for the plant. Don't paint the wound, don't put tar on it or anything. Just leave it healed naturally and the tree will heal it up. Alright, here's an example of a branch that is crossing over from the direction it should be growing. It starts over here and it's coming all the way out here. You can tell this whole tree is not structured very well, but we're just going to do our best. And I'm just going to remove this as an example of a branch that's crossing over and not growing in the proper direction. I'm taking it off here first and then I'm going to take it out at its point. You might think that's a little high, but that is where it is joining with this other branch and we'll do that there. And then I'm going to take off this branch here. It's underneath, it's really shaded, it could get diseased also. And it's just in poor shape. So this one's going to go. This one is pointing downward. And here's another example of a crossing branch where we have the main branch here and then this one's growing on top of it like that. It's going to get rid of that. And while we're at it, get rid of all these other ones that are up here. Growing downward, growing outward there, at a bad angle, some dead stuff in here. And we'll just continue to do this, try to remove things that are pointing downward, straight upward, or crossing over and shading the tree a lot. We just want to open the tree up a little. All the branches are very close together. There's not any airflow in between here. And right behind me here, you can see that there's no air in this area and this branch comes out and then leans across this other branch, which is kind of a main part of the tree. So I'm going to remove this part here just to give it a little more air. I'm just going to use my saw. I'm going to look for the branch collar. There, you can see it's nice cut on the branch and there's this nice collar that's left on the tree for it to heal. And you can see what a big difference this is going to make for this tree to let that air in there in sunlight. We like a lot of sunlight in the trees because it helps to turn the apples red in the fall. On this branch, it's kind of an important part of the tree. My neighbor does want to get apples off this again. But look how this crosses like this. This is a pretty important part. This could be an important part, but what I'm going to do is cut off the top part and this is the part I'm going to allow to continue to grow. So now this apple tree is going to follow the branch that's left here, so it's going to grow out this way. All right, here's our tree. This is pretty much pruned. I've taken a lot out of the interior and whatever's been hanging down. I'm going to show you the pile of sticks. It's right here. That's quite a nice pile. And then I'll give you another shot of the tree. This is how it looks now. And there's my neighbor, Bob, whose tree we pruned and I hope he's happy with it. If he is happy, I'll get a couple apples this fall. If not, no apples.