Trimming Back a Short-Needled Pine Tree

Here we have this question on a pine tree. “It’s a short-needle pine tree. The new growth has already come out. How far back can I trim that?”

So ideally we would want to only trim the new growth. Most of the universities are going to tell you you only want to do about 25 or 30%. From my experience, we’ve been okay trimming up to about 50% of the new growth. Again, you’re not going to trim 50% of the new growth off the entire tree, but you’re always going to have certain sides of the tree that push more growth than the other side. You want to keep it balanced.

A lot of times that new growth that you’re talking about, as it comes out, we call them candles. As those candles come up, a lot of times before the needles push out of the candle, you can trim it at that point, and it’s much easier to trim those evergreens when they’re in that stage.

If you wait, the candles are going to fully form, and it’s going to be harder to do it. It’s not like we’re going to get cooler in August. Most of the time, we’re going to be warmer and have more intense heat. Again, if you’re only taking a small portion of that new growth off, it’s not a big issue. You can go ahead and trim on that. It’s totally different if you were talking about trimming huge amounts of the plant off, going into a hot, stressful situation. You’re just talking about light trimming to shape the plant up. You can do that now. It should not be a problem.

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