Does my apple tree fruit on spurs or on the tips?

This is the difference behind the most common complaint about apple pruning: a reader prunes exactly as instructed, tidily, every winter, and the tree flowers less each year. Almost always the tree is a tip or partial tip bearer, and the standard advice to shorten the previous season's growth is removing the fruit buds along with it.

Step by step

1. Learn what the two buds look like.A fruit bud is fat, rounded and slightly downy. A growth bud is small, slim, pointed and pressed flat against the stem. You can see the difference clearly on a bare branch in January.
2. Look at where the fat buds are.Fat buds on short knobbly spurs along two-year-old and older wood means a spur-bearer. Fat buds at and just behind the ends of last summer's slim new shoots means a tip-bearer. Both patterns together means a partial tip-bearer, which many varieties are.
3. Check the variety if you know it.Common UK tip and partial tip bearers include Bramley's Seedling, Worcester Pearmain, Discovery, Blenheim Orange, Irish Peach and Lord Lambourne. Most other garden varieties, and nearly all pears, are spur-bearers.
4. Prune a spur-bearer by shortening and thinning.In winter, shorten the previous summer's shoots by about a third to a bud, remove crossing and inward growth, and thin congested spur clusters on older wood. This keeps producing new spurs and keeps fruit size up.
5. Prune a tip-bearer by thinning whole shoots.Leave the young shoots at full length, buds intact. Instead, remove some entire older branches back to their point of origin to make space and light, and take out whatever is dead, crossing or crowding. Renewal, not shortening.
6. Treat a partial tip-bearer as a tip-bearer.Leave most young shoots unshortened, shorten only those you specifically want to branch, and rely on thinning for the rest. It costs nothing to be cautious and it costs a crop to be wrong.
7. Never shorten every shoot on a tree you cannot identify.If you do not know the variety and cannot read the buds, prune conservatively: dead, damaged, diseased and crossing wood only. That is always correct on any apple tree.
8. Renew wood on both types over time.Very old spur systems and very old branches both crop worse. Taking one or two older branches back to a young replacement each winter keeps either type productive.

Tips

• A tip-bearer looks untidier than a spur-bearer after pruning, with longer whippy shoots left on. That is correct.
• Tip-bearers are poor candidates for cordons and espaliers, which depend on spur formation. If you want a trained apple, pick a known spur-bearer.
• You can identify the type without knowing the variety at all — just walk out in January and look at where the fat buds are.
• Pears are almost all spur-bearers, which is why the standard shortening advice works so much better on them.

Common mistakes

• Shortening all of last summer's growth on a tip-bearer every winter — It removes the fruit buds, so the tree flowers less each year, and the cutting stimulates yet more vegetative growth. This is the classic pruned-into-barrenness pattern.
• Assuming all apples are pruned the same way — The generic advice is written for spur-bearers, which are the majority. On the significant minority that are not, following it exactly is the problem.
• Cutting into an old spur system to 'tidy' it without thinning — Spurs are permanent fruiting points that take years to build. Thin whole spur clusters deliberately, do not shave them off.

Questions people ask