Pruning Cherry Trees: When to Cut Sweet, Sour, and Flowering Cherries
Prune sweet cherries right after harvest, in dry summer weather. In the Sacramento Valley that means late June through August, once the Bings and Stellas are off the tree. Prune sour cherries in late winter before the buds swell, during a dry stretch. Prune flowering cherries, including weeping and Yoshino types, right after the petals drop.
The reason is rain. Cherries are stone fruit, and bacterial canker, the disease that kills young sweet cherries, gets in through pruning cuts when they’re wet. Our cherry disease guide covers how to spot it. Timing your cuts to dry weather keeps it out. The rest of the job is shaping the tree so it fruits where you can reach. If you’re still picking a variety, start with where cherries grow well, because chill hours decide whether there’s anything to prune for.
When to prune cherry trees
Sweet cherries (Prunus avium): summer, after harvest. August carries less risk of bacterial infection than winter, which is why Oregon State’s home orchard guide puts sweet cherry pruning there. Penn State makes sweet cherries its one exception to winter pruning and moves them to after fruiting or early July.
In Oregon State bacterial canker trials, wounds made in summer stayed uninfected when no water reached them. Susceptibility climbed again in fall, and bacteria on the buds jumped 10 to 100 times over around bloom, which makes spring heading cuts the worst cuts you can make. In the same trials, summer wounds healed faster than January wounds.
Sacramento summers handle the dry part for you. It rarely rains from June through September, and the cherry harvest in the Valley runs late May into June. Prune once the fruit is off and you’ve got a two-month dry window with nothing to work around except the sprinklers. If your overhead irrigation hits the canopy, wait at least a week after pruning before you run it.
Sour cherries (Prunus cerasus): late winter, or summer if canker is a problem. University of Minnesota Extension times stone fruit pruning for late winter, before buds break. Sour cherries are less prone to bacterial canker than sweet ones, so dormant pruning works fine in a cold, dry stretch. In a wet Northern California February, that stretch can be hard to find. If you’ve seen gumming on your sour cherry, move it to the summer schedule with the sweet cherries.
Flowering cherries: right after bloom. Yoshino, Kwanzan, Okame, and weeping cherries set next spring’s flowers on this year’s wood. Prune in spring after the petals drop, and next year’s buds haven’t formed yet.
When not to prune any cherry: fall (October through December here) and any week with rain in the forecast. Dead and broken branches are the exception. Take those off whenever you see them.
Plums get the same summer schedule for the same reason, with silver leaf added to the list of wound diseases. Peach trees run the other way: they fruit only on last year’s wood and get cut hard in late winter.
Sweet cherry vs. sour cherry: two different trees
A sweet cherry wants to be a big tree. On standard Mazzard rootstock it reaches 25 to 35 feet, and young trees shoot straight up. A young sweet cherry will grow vertical limbs 6 to 8 feet long without a single side branch. Most of your pruning on a sweet cherry is about making it branch low and then keeping it short.
Train it to three to five scaffold branches, either as an open center (Oregon State’s choice) or a modified leader with the scaffolds spaced 8 inches or more apart up the trunk (Utah State’s). Both work in a backyard. I’d pick the open center, because it stays lower, and a lower tree is one you can net before the birds strip it.
A sour cherry like Montmorency or North Star is a smaller tree, and its weak spot is the wood itself. The wood is brittle, so three main scaffold limbs with wide crotch angles are enough, on either a modified leader or an open center. A tart cherry already grows in a natural vase shape, so you’re mostly guiding what it wants to do.
| Sweet cherry | Sour cherry | |
|---|---|---|
| Main pruning time | Late June through August, after harvest | Late winter in dry weather |
| Shape | Open center (3-5 scaffolds) or modified leader | Open center or modified leader (3 scaffolds) |
| Biggest pruning job | Forcing branches, then height control | Wide crotch angles on brittle wood |
| Mature tree work | Height control, thinning, spur renewal | Occasional thinning for light |
Pruning a young cherry tree (years 1 to 3)
At planting
Head the nursery tree at the height where you want the first branches. If it has fewer than three good side branches, cut the leader to 30 to 40 inches. If it already has branches, keep three or four well-spaced ones 18 to 24 inches up and remove the rest. Bare-root season here runs December through February, so you’ll make this first cut in winter. Make it on a dry day. If this is your first bare-root tree, mklibrary.com has a walkthrough on planting bare-root trees.
First summer
This is where cherries differ from most fruit trees. A vigorous young sweet cherry can put on 3 feet of new growth by midsummer with no side branches at all. Once a shoot reaches about 3 feet, cut a foot or more off the tip. The shoot branches below the cut, and you get your scaffold framework a year early. Do it by late June. Training cuts made later in summer can leave narrow crotches and soft growth that doesn’t harden off before the cold.
Years 2 and 3
Choose your permanent scaffolds and keep them spaced at least 8 inches apart up the trunk, pointing in different directions. Remove:
- Shoots growing straight up through the middle
- Branches with narrow, V-shaped crotches (these split under fruit on cherries)
- Anything growing inward or crossing another branch
- Suckers from the base
On a sour cherry, strip the extra shoots in the first two years so all the new growth goes onto the permanent scaffolds. If a sweet cherry wasn’t pruned in summer, head each shoot to about 2 feet in winter. After 5 or 6 years, stop heading and switch to thinning cuts only.
Keep it light overall. Heavy pruning on young stone fruit delays fruiting and pushes leafy growth instead.
Pruning a mature cherry tree
A mature sweet cherry needs little pruning beyond height control. It fruits on spurs, the stubby short shoots along the older branches, and every spur you cut is fruit you won’t pick.
Spurs take time. A shoot grows single leaves its first year, forms non-fruiting spurs its second, and those spurs bear fruit in the third season. The best fruit grows on the younger spurs. Commercial growers keep spurs from getting too old by cutting back about 20 percent of the fruiting side branches each year, so no spur is older than five. On a backyard tree, cutting out one or two of the oldest, most crowded side branches a year does the same job.
The yearly routine, after harvest:
- Dead, broken, and cankered wood. If a gummy, sunken canker wraps around most of a limb, remove the whole limb. Otherwise cut several inches below the canker into clean wood.
- Water sprouts. These are the vertical shoots that pop up along the tops of the scaffolds. Take them off at the base.
- Thinning. Remove crossing branches and open up crowded areas so light reaches the inner spurs. Spurs in shade quit producing.
- Height. Cut tall leaders back to an outward-facing side branch at the height you want, just outside the branch collar.
Height is the hard one on a standard sweet cherry, and rootstock decides most of it. On Gisela 5 or 6, a sweet cherry stays around 12 to 18 feet. If you bought a cherry on Mazzard seedling rootstock, you’re committing to a yearly height cut or a tall ladder.
Thinning and heading cuts work the same on a cherry as on an apple or pear, and the fruit tree pruning basics cover both.
Pruning flowering cherries
A Yoshino or Kwanzan seldom needs pruning beyond dead or diseased wood and the odd pair of crossing branches. Do the crossing branches right after bloom so you don’t cut off next year’s flowers.
Cherries bleed sap heavily from fresh cuts, and waiting until the leaves have matured cuts down the bleeding. Take off the vigorous upright shoots along the main branches while they’re still young. On a Sacramento Yoshino that means pruning in April or early May, after the leaves size up and before the heat.
Keep mowers and string trimmers away from the trunk. Flowering cherry bark is thin and tears easily, and these trees pick up cankers. A Yoshino is also short-lived, 15 to 20 years by Clemson’s count, so a heavy renovation on an old one is rarely worth the effort.
Weeping cherry pruning mistakes
A weeping cherry is at least two plants joined together. Weeping Higan cherries are usually grafted onto a sweet cherry rootstock at 4 to 5 feet. Everything above the graft weeps. Anything that sprouts at or below it grows straight up, and it grows faster than the weeping part.
The mistakes people make:
- Leaving the upright shoots. A straight shoot from the trunk or rootstock looks like healthy new growth. It isn’t weeping wood, and left alone these shoots can shade out the weeping top. Cut every one off at its base, as soon as you see it.
- Ignoring suckers. Root suckers come from the rootstock too. Remove them at ground level.
- Giving it a bowl haircut. Shearing the trailing branches level all the way around leaves a lampshade with stubs. Shorten individual branches only where they block a walkway or the mower, cutting each back to a side shoot.
- Pruning in fall or winter. Prune right after bloom, the same timing as any flowering cherry.
Common cherry tree pruning mistakes
Pruning in fall. October and November feel like cleanup season, and they’re the worst time to cut a cherry. Bacteria on the tree are building up toward winter and the rains are starting.
Making spring heading cuts. Shortening branches in March, right as the tree blooms, is pruning at the moment the bacteria on the buds peak.
Topping a tall tree. Shearing the top straight across leaves a row of stubs, and each one sprouts a cluster of upright shoots. Within a couple of seasons the top is thicker than before you started. Cut back to a side branch instead.
Keeping narrow crotches. Cherry wood is brittle. A V-shaped crotch on a three-year-old tree is the one that splits under a full crop years later. Remove it while it’s small.
Cutting off the spurs. Heavy thinning on a mature cherry removes fruiting spurs that took three years to grow. Take out whole branches where it’s crowded, and leave the spur-covered wood alone.
Leaving stubs or cutting flush. End each cut just outside the branch collar, the swollen ring at the base of the branch. A flush cut removes the collar, which is the tree’s barrier against decay. Clemson recommends skipping wound dressings, which don’t stop decay.
Ignoring cankers. Pruning through a canker into healthy wood, several inches below the gumming, removes the infection without spreading it. Leaving cankered wood on the tree keeps the bacteria in your yard.
Tools for cherry pruning
- Bypass hand pruners for shoots and water sprouts up to about 3/4 inch. The Felco F2 cuts cleanly and can be rebuilt with replacement blades and springs. Our hand pruner comparison explains why bypass beats anvil for live wood.
- Loppers for branches up to about 1 1/2 inches. On a backyard cherry kept to 15 feet, the shorter Felco F211 20-inch lopper reaches the interior without banging into neighboring limbs. See our lopper buying advice for sizing.
- A folding saw for the height cuts and anything thicker. The Silky GomBoy 240mm cuts on the pull stroke and leaves a clean face instead of torn bark.
Dull blades crush and tear bark. mklibrary.com has a good rundown on keeping garden tools in shape between seasons.
Cherry pruning calendar for Northern California
| Month | Sweet cherry | Sour cherry | Flowering cherry |
|---|---|---|---|
| December-February | Plant bare-root; first heading cut on a dry day. Dead wood only on established trees | Main pruning, dry stretches only | Dead wood only |
| March-April | Hands off during bloom | Finish before bud break | Prune right after bloom |
| May | Harvest | Leave it alone | Remove upright shoots and suckers |
| Late June-August | Main pruning window. Thin, lower height, renew spurs | Canker cuts, if needed | Light cleanup only |
| September | Finish by early September | Leave it alone | Leave it alone |
| October-November | No pruning | No pruning | No pruning |
Frequently asked questions
When is the best time to prune a cherry tree?
Prune sweet cherries right after harvest, from late June through August, during dry weather. Prune sour cherries in late winter before the buds break, during a dry stretch. Prune flowering cherries right after they finish blooming. Avoid fall and the wet weeks around bloom, when bacterial canker infects pruning wounds most easily.
Can you prune cherry trees in winter?
Yes, but only during a dry, cold stretch. Bacterial canker needs water to infect a wound, and research from Oregon State found winter wounds took longer to heal than summer wounds. In Northern California, where winter is the rainy season, summer pruning right after harvest is the safer choice for sweet cherries. Dead and broken branches can come off any time of year.
How do I prune a young cherry tree?
At planting, head the tree at the height where you want the first scaffold branches. In the first two or three years, keep three to five wide-angled branches spaced around the trunk and remove the rest. On vigorous young sweet cherries, pinch or cut back the new shoots once they reach about 3 feet in summer to make them branch.
What should you not do when pruning a cherry tree?
Do not prune in fall or during rainy weeks, do not top the tree by shearing it straight across, and do not leave narrow V-shaped crotches on young trees, since cherry wood is brittle and splits there. Do not prune off more fruiting spurs than you need to, because each spur takes about three seasons to start bearing.
How do you prune a weeping cherry tree?
Prune a weeping cherry right after it blooms. Cut off every shoot that grows straight up from the trunk or from below the graft, which sits about 4 to 5 feet up on most weeping cherries. Those shoots come from the rootstock and will not weep. Shorten trailing branches only where they block a path or the mower.
Do sweet and sour cherries need different pruning?
Yes. Sweet cherries grow tall and upright and are prone to bacterial canker, so they get summer pruning after harvest and regular height control. Sour cherries such as Montmorency are smaller trees with brittle wood that need wide crotch angles, three main scaffolds, and only light thinning once they mature.
The planting and care products linked across this site are collected in the Tree Planting and Watering Essentials list on my Amazon storefront.