My standard book is AHS Pruning and Training which covers all plants.

Lee Reich has The Pruning Book which is supposed to be good but I don't have it. I think it covers all plants as well.

Harry Baker's Growing Fruit has some of the same material as the AHS book above in it because they are ultimately all from the Royal Hort. Soc. books on the subject. This book has the fruit stuff only, but also covers all other aspects of fruit growing.

Personally the book I read the most is Horace Wright's Fruit Growers Guide which is the most extensive writing I have ever found on pruning fruit trees. It is from 1920 and a bit outdated in some respects, but in other respects it has old knowledge which is mostly lost now. I bought this book used somewhere. This book is a revision of a book set written by John Wright who if I recall correctly is his father. His fathers set is online - John Wright's Fruit Growers Guide - an epic 6-volume tome on all aspects of fruit growing. I have not read that set but am sure it has a huge amount of information in it about pruning and training.

Scott

Scott,

Thank you so much for the link to the senior Wright's book on fruit growing. For anyone interested the table of contents to all volumes can be found at the back of Vol. #6. You can have one or all volumes printed and bound by website Lulu for around $34/each in color. I used the flip option and was almost able to read it (with difficulty though). The parts on shaping, training and pruning are indeed excellent.

Horace Wright's book has been updated and revised by a second author and is available new printed in (I believe) India for $106. I found this when I Googled the author and title.

jmmedeiros:

I have purchased and read a new book, "The Home Orchard," by several authors at the University of California.

I found the book to be very good. It covers all the aspects of growing fruits and nuts in the home orchard. It is especially helpful for California residents, like myself, because most other books are written from the author's experience with other geographies, soils, insects, diseases and weather that are not always relevant to California.

Here's the link and it is also below.

http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/InOrder/Shop/ItemDetails.asp?ItemNo=3485

Tony

Here is a link that might be useful: The Home Orchard (UC ANR Catalog Listing)

My bible and the long time standard on fruit tree pruning in So Cal is Sanford Martin's How to Prune Fruit Trees. I have had my copy for probably 30 years but I have seen copies at Armstrong's. Because it is specific to Southern California, it gets into details the others skip, like the differences in pruning black and green figs. It is essentially home published with rudimentary line drawings but it is invaluable.

Hi, I was wondering how did you go about getting Lulu to print the Wright book. I went to their website and couldn't find it.