What do fruiting spurs look like on different types of trees?

Hi, sorry to ask what is probably an obvious question. I planted some fruit trees in 2019 and have been early spring pruning here in Central, Missouri, with the goal of keeping them short, open vase. Now I’m thinking enough years have passed I should make sure I’m not cutting off Fruit spurs. I have spent hours looking on the Internet and surprisingly it’s hard to find. I have found apples, peaches and pears. However, I also have a bing cherry and a Tartarian cherry, as well as Santa Rosa plums - i’ve found it hard to locate specific pictures of fruiting ““ spurs for these.

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My lapins cherry started in 2018…



It has produced a few blossoms the past two springs but no fruit yet. This year i am seeing lots of these type short stems with multi buds… pretty sure those are fruiting spurs.

Hoping I finally get some fruit this year.

With the warm up we have coming the next 10 days… expext i will see some blossoms open.

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Thanks TNHunter, i’ll have to pay more attention to what goes on with the buds. Hoping for fruit this year. Keeping my fingers crossed.



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Next time your trees bloom look at the wood the blossoms are on not the blossoms themselves. To some extent many across species look about the same. Many fruit on spurs on 2 yr and older wood as well as on last season’s wood.

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I’ve been reading about thinning fruit and I can identify apple and pear(and maybe peach) fruit buds but not plum or cherry. Also, confused about pruning the peach, cherry & plum since they grow on one year old wood?

All of those bear both on spurs and last years wood. Cherry has big fat fruit buds. Those are fairly easy to identify. Plum fruit buds are small somewhat like apricot. In all cases fruit will be on smaller wood. But some of that will be small spur wood on bigger wood. The spurs may only be inches long.

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The rounded ones are flower buds


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Thank you :blush:

Peaches are the only fruit that you’ll always need one year old wood to fruit on. Once you have a decent structure, keep the weak growing shoots and head them back to about 12 inches and you can keep a couple peaches on each shoot. After that shoot fruits you can stub it back to a few inches long the following dormant season and it will grow a shoot for the following season. It’s important to keep this cycle going with peaches otherwise the tree can get a bit out of control. It’s tempting to keep the weak shoots growing longer to get more bearing wood, but this will cause more problems down the line.

So a general rule for peach pruning goes
Year 1: Grow fruiting shoot
Year 2: Fruit the shoot
Year 3: Stub back shoot and it will hopefully grow a new fruiting shoot for the next year.

Peach trees can be much harder to renew than other stone fruit and apples and pears and if they are not renewed, the bearing wood will keep going up and up and up and become unmanageable, hard to spray, etc.

For cherries read this
Cherry Training Systems

Plums are a bit of combination between peaches and apples or pears. They can fruit on weak growing one year old shoots, but then those shoots can fruit for multiple years. Same goes for apricots.

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My 5 yr Eu Plums are blooming for the first time.

Evidently that above is what fruit buds/spurs look like on a young tree.

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Good to see - a picture shows what words just can’t sometimes. Also seeing the white colored petals of the flower unfolding is satisfying :slight_smile:

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