Pomegranate: Tree or Bush?

Q. I have a pomegranate plant that I started two years
ago.  It is about four feet tall now and
looks like it wants to be a bush.  Can I
trim all the little branches off except the biggest one and try to make it a
tree?

Red Silk pomegranate second year after planting at the UNCE Orchard. Suckers can be removed and trained to a tree form.

A. Pomegranates can be trained as a bush, which they
normally want to be anyway, or they can be trained into single or multiple
trunked trees. I prefer them as a multitrunked tree myself.

            I
usually pick three to five of the largest stems coming from the ground and
remove the rest below ground level. Each winter I remove any new sucker growth
from the base and just retain these three to five oldest stems.

Fifteen year old pomegranate trained to multi trunk tree form and kept at 7 ft (2.5m) height. Fruits produced are fewer but larger and more marketable.

            It is
important to remove these suckers below ground level. Do not just simply cut
the suckers off at soil level. Pull soil away from the suckers and remove them
from the mother plant. This should not be more than a few inches below the soil
level.

            Suckers
can be removed anytime of the year but removal during the winter months is most
common. If you continue to remove suckers for the next five years they will
stop producing suckers or the number of suckers will decrease significantly
over this time.  The multi-trunk tree
will have little to no sucker removal and you can just prune the tops each
winter.

            If you do
not remove these suckers at least annually then you will have sucker
development for many more years to come.