Excessive new growth

[Speed Gardener]

Afternoon All,
I have a question regarding what to do with all the excessive soft new growth on fruit trees and bushes.
My neighbour has an espalier Concorde pear which has been in the ground for three years. There are three established lateral pairs and an embryo fourth pair which will be tied in later this year. The new vertical growths from the bottom laterals are now about over two feet long and still going strong. Can this new growth be cut out now to prevent the energy going to waste and be directed into the new laterals, or is there a chance the cuts will bleed and damage the tree overall? I summer prune my apple cordons but pears are a bit of a mystery to me..
Also, my currant cordons have two feet long soft new branches, some of which have been broken in the high winds we've had recently, is it OK to cut them off early as well?

[FB.]

Pears are pruned in much the same way as apples.

I suspect that your friends espalier has either been over-fed with nitrogen (causing too much growth), or has not been regularly summer pruned (to keep its growth compact and to enhance formation of fruit spurs).

If you can wait until July the results are likely to be better than if you prune now, but pruning now is unlikely to do much harm.

Pruning the new growth hard around mid-July controls vigour and channels the plants energy to more fruit spurs for the next seasons crop.

Pruning in winter - when the leaves have fallen - tends to cause vigorous re-growth and reduced fruiting.
Stone fruits (plums, cherries etc) should not be pruned during the dormant season, instead, they are either pruned in early spring (to shape) or summer (to control vigour).

The logic behind summer and winter pruning is that in summer, most of the trees activity is in the leaves. If they are removed the plant loses the nutrients and the sunlight-gathering ability, which calms down the growth rate.
With winter pruning, most of the trees energy is in the roots, so that any above-ground parts that are removed are soon re-grown (often multiple branch growths at the point of pruning) by the energy coming back up from the roots in spring time.
Despite trees looking dormant above ground in late autumn through to early spring, there is often much root growth going on below ground, especially around the time of - and just after - leaf fall and around the time that buds start to swell in spring.

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I don't see a problem with tidying-up damaged fruit bushes due to the recent wind damage: the damaged bits will die anyway, so there won't be any additional loss of vigour by tidying them up.