 Hello, this is Scott Kanoki. I'm with the Benson County Extension Service and I'm in Minnewack in North Dakota today and I just wanted to do a short demonstration on pruning an apple tree and at this time it's it's late March early spring so it's the time that we want to be pruning before we get a lot of growth and stuff coming on and that way we can decrease any disease spread. What you'll need is just a regular pruners and for some of the bigger branches if you really want to get after it we have some a big lopper and then also a sweetie saw for taking off some branches and many times you can take the biggest bigger branches off with the big lopper and then and then use a sweetie saw to get up close on that branch collar but what I'm trying to do is to open up this this canopy I've been working on this tree for a couple of years and just trying to open it up a little bit so we decrease the amount of disease and stuff and what I don't like sometimes and some of our trees get so awfully tall so I'm trying to train this one to have lateral branches coming out and you can kind of see what I've done in the past a little bit here and and some of these are you know they want to grow right up right up to the heavens and pretty soon you're gonna need a an apparatus with a basket on just just to get your apples so I'm gonna prune out some of these branches that that go awfully high up up into the air and there again if they're growing into the canopy you want to remove them because eventually they will cause rubbing on each other's branches and you can create a wound and that's just a perfect spot for disease to take a foothold and and and get started we've had a lot of fire blight these last couple of years especially in some of the ornamental crabs and one particular one a zestar had quite a bit in it so by keeping this canopy open we can certainly keep that disease potential down and increase the airflow I just like to give you an example of cut I made here when I when I make these cuts I don't want to dig into the branch itself I just want to be you know right on that branch collar and then it'll have a nice cut that it it'll help heal and you won't even know what's there in time you can see down here there was there was a cut here a prior year and it healed up and is doing just fine I talk about some of these branches growing inside here you kind of want to thin them out a little bit there again for added circulation and one thing Tom Kelb told me when I first started pulling trees he said you show that tree who's boss you're not going to kill the tree but one thing he did caution me on was don't cut off more than 25 percent of the branches in one particular year otherwise it's a bit of a shock to the tree and it takes a little more time to recover so if you just keep up up at it annually you can you can keep it clean