When should a flowering crabapple be pruned?
Dormant work from late winter into early spring before bud break is the calendar, but fire blight overrides the calendar: infected wood comes out whenever you find it, cut 8 to 12 inches below the visible canker, in dry weather, sterilizing between cuts. The species trap is watersprouts — crabapple answers interior thinning cuts with a vertical broom of shoots, so an aggressive one-time cleanout commits the customer to annual sprout removal.
Reading flowering crabapple before you cut
The signature midsummer yellow-and-drop that panics owners is apple scab defoliation, and the tree refoliates the following spring — it is a cultivar problem, not a death sentence. Real decline reads on a different schedule: thin, sparse foliage in spring rather than late summer, a shrinking flower load year over year, dead scaffold limbs, and trunk cankers or borer holes on a tree past 40 years.
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