This Is the Best Time to Prune Citrus Trees for More Delicious Fruit—Here’s How to Do It Right

Key Points

• Trim dead, damaged, or crowded branches to boost fruit quality and keep trees tidy.

• Thinning the canopy and reducing height improves sun exposure, airflow, and ease of care.

• Regular pruning supports healthier growth, fewer pests, and better-looking, more productive trees.

If you have the climate to grow orange trees or other compact citrus varieties in your yard, you can enjoy an abundance of glossy green foliage, fragrant blossoms, and juicy, fresh fruit.

Evergreen citrus trees with strong branches don’t require the type of intensive pruning fruit-bearing deciduous trees do. However, you’ll still have to do some trimming to prevent irregular growth and an overly dense canopy.

Follow this guide to learn how to prune citrus trees to promote healthy flavorsome fruit and a tidy appearance.

How to Prune Citrus Trees

Before getting started, grab your sterilized secateurs or hand pruners, loppers for large branches and a pruning saw. You might also need an orchard ladder to reach the canopy if your trees are tall.

Remove Branches for Maintenance

Remove dead, dying, damaged, discolored, crossing, disease- or pest-infested branches from young and mature citrus trees. This tidies the trees' appearance and directs all the energy to the healthiest growth.

Remove small branches with hand pruners, secateurs, or loppers. You might need to use a tree saw to remove larger branches. Citrus trees have thin, easily damaged bark, so prune carefully; aim the blade toward the tree for a clean cut and cut at the collar (the shoulder between the branch and the trunk).

For large, heavy branches, over 1.5 inches in diameter, create a three-part cut as follows:

• Pick a spot 6 to 12 inches from the collar and saw through 1/3 of the branch underside. This undercut prevents the branch's weight from causing tears in the bark or damage to the branches below.

• The next cut should start on the top of the branch about 3 inches from the undercut. Cut from top to bottom until the two cuts meet and the branch falls away.

• Cut away the remaining stub back to the branch collar.

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Thin the Tree’s Canopy

Thinning out overly dense citrus tree canopies every few years helps ensure ample sunlight reaches the fruit below. You want dappled sunlight to hit the ground below the canopy at midday to produce the most vigorous and flavorsome fruit.

To achieve this, strategically remove some larger center branches (using the three-part cut method) to allow more light through.

Do this gradually, assessing the sun cover after cutting each branch. Excessive thinning can lead to sunburn of the remaining branches.

Prune to Reduce Tree Height

Keeping mature citrus trees under 8 feet tall makes managing harvesting, pruning, and other maintenance tasks easier and safer. Avoid cutting off more than a third of the tree’s height, as excessive pruning can affect its vigor.

Taking off the top growth of tall, spindly young trees helps promote a lower, fuller canopy.

Focus on pruning downward-growing shoots, as this promotes the development of the upward-growing buds you want for healthy fruit production.

Skirt Your Citrus Tree

If your citrus tree has low-hanging skirt branches touching or trailing near the ground, removing these up to 18 to 24 inches above the ground every two years can be beneficial.

This helps with aesthetics, prevents soil-borne pathogens from contaminating fruit, and allows easier access to the soil for weeding and feeding. It’s particularly useful for satsuma mandarins, which have especially low-hanging branches.

Protect Exposed Wood

If parts of the bare trunk or branches of citrus trees are exposed to intense direct sun after pruning, painting the exposed wood helps protect it from sunburn, which can lead to damaging cankers and bark cracking.

Coat the exposed wood with tree paint or a whitewash of one part latex paint to one part water. Avoid oil-based paints.

When to Prune Citrus Trees

It’s best to remove dead, dying, damaged, discolored, crossing, disease- or pest-infested branches as soon as you see them, as long as it's not frost season.

For other pruning, wait until after the intense summer heat and before spring shoots form; otherwise, this can cause problems with sap flow.

Never prune citrus trees when there is danger of frosts. Early fall pruning isn’t generally recommended, as any new shoots growing can be damaged by winter frosts.

How often you prune your citrus tree depends on the species, cultivar, and local conditions. Pruning lemon trees and other fast-growing citrus species lightly annually is often best. Others may not require pruning (other than removal of dead or damaged branches) more than every few years.

However, the longer a citrus tree goes between pruning, the more intense the thinning will need to be, and the larger branches can be more physically challenging to remove.

4 Other Citrus Tree Pruning Tips

Below are some additional helpful citrus tree pruning tips to keep in mind.

• Sprouts or plant suckers are vigorous, vegetative, upright stems that grow out of trunks, off branches, and from roots. Remove these green and barkless stems by hand when they are small, as they use up lots of water and nutrients, and the fruit they produce isn’t tasty.

• If your citrus tree has a heavy fruit harvest one year and a light harvest the next, this is referred to as alternate bearing. Heavier pruning after the light year is beneficial. This reduces fruit-bearing wood and lets the tree build its reserves to produce a more balanced fruit-bearing habit.

• If you plant a row of compact trees close together to create a privacy hedge, you can use electric hedgers to trim them and allow light into the interior of the hedge, resulting in greater fruit production.

• When you chop off large, mature branches and the wound diameter is large, consider using a copper spray to seal it. This minimizes the risk of developing infections such as citrus canker.

Read the original article on The Spruce