Fruit Tree Pruning - The No-pruning Option

The No-pruning Option

The no-pruning option is usually ignored by fruit experts, though often practised by default in people's back gardens! But it has its advantages. Obviously it reduces work, and more surprisingly it can lead to higher overall yields.

—Patrick Whitefield, How to make a forest garden p16

Masanobu Fukuoka, as part of early experiments on his family farm in Japan, experimented with no-pruning methods, noting that he ended up killing many fruit trees by simply letting them go, which made them become convoluted and tangled, and thus unhealthy. Then he realised this is the difference between natural-form fruit trees and the process of change of tree form that results from abandoning previously-pruned unnatural fruit trees. He concluded that the trees should be raised all their lives without pruning, so they form healthy and efficient branch patterns that follow their natural inclination. This is part of his implementation of the Tao-philosophy of Wú wéi translated in part as no-action (against nature), and he described it as no unnecessary pruning, nature farming or "do-nothing" farming, of fruit trees, distinct from non-intervention or literal no-pruning. He ultimately achieved yields comparable to or exceeding standard/intensive practices of using pruning and chemical fertilisation.

Other sustainable agriculture or permaculture advocates have also practiced no-pruning methods with success. Sepp Holzer successfully used no-pruning methods on his high-altitude farm in the Austrian Alps, noting that under heavy winter snow loads, short-pruned branches break, often killing the tree, but longer unpruned branches bend down and touch the ground, giving them another point of support and preventing breakage.