Start with what the winter left behind

Before you sharpen a single blade, take a slow walk around the plot with a bucket, a notebook and a pair of secateurs. Winter tells you things that summer hides. Look at the shape of every tree against the sky, check the base of the trunks for vole damage and the ties for anything that has rubbed or snapped in the gales.

The snap test is your best friend for dead wood. A live shoot bends and shows green under the bark; a dead one cracks cleanly and shows brown. Work through the orchard and the fruit cage and deal with the obvious casualties first:

• Dead, diseased and damaged wood — cut back to clean, healthy growth.
• Branches that cross and rub, which open wounds that canker loves.
• Suckers pushing up from below the graft union — pull them away rather than cutting, so you take the dormant buds with them.
• Broken stakes, frayed ties and tree guards that have split over winter.

If you do nothing else this month, this hour of tidying will pay you back tenfold by August.

Prune apples and pears now, leave stone fruit alone

Apples, pears, quince and medlars are dormant and can be pruned from now until the buds break — ideally before the end of February, while the sap is still sleeping. Aim for an open goblet shape with light and air moving through the middle, because good airflow is the cheapest disease control you will ever get. Take out no more than a quarter of the canopy in one season; a tree shocked by heavy pruning will throw out a forest of water shoots in reply.

If you are unsure whether your apple is a tip-bearer or a spur-bearer, do the minimum. Remove the three Ds, shorten last year's growth on the leaders by about a third, and leave the rest to reveal itself in summer.

Plums, damsons, cherries and apricots are a different matter. Leave them entirely until late June or July, when they are in full growth and the spores of silver leaf are far less likely to land on an open wound. A broken branch now is the only exception — take it back to a sound side shoot and keep your fingers crossed.

In the fruit cage, blackcurrants want a third of their oldest wood cut to the ground each year to keep them young and fruiting. Redcurrants and gooseberries want the opposite: shorten side shoots to a few buds and keep the framework. Autumn-fruiting raspberries can be mown to the ground now; summer varieties want last year's fruited canes cut out and the new ones tied in.

Feed the hungry ones

Hunger shows itself quietly: pale, small leaves, spindly growth, and a heavy crop last year that the tree never quite recovered from. Grass around the trunk is a fierce competitor, so feed the tree rather than the lawn.

Scatter a balanced general fertiliser at roughly 70g per square metre, measured out from the drip line rather than heaped against the trunk, and add sulphate of potash at about 35g per square metre for fruit size and colour. Blackcurrants are greedy and will thank you for a little extra nitrogen; apples on chalky, thin soil do better with small amounts, little and often. Always apply to damp ground or water it in afterwards — dry fertiliser on dry roots is money wasted.

Mulch like a doughnut, not a volcano

Weed thoroughly first, because mulching over perennial weeds simply gives them a warm blanket. Then spread five to eight centimetres of well-rotted manure, garden compost or leafmould over the root zone, out to the spread of the branches.

Leave a clear ten-centimetre collar of soil around the trunk. Piling mulch against bark keeps it damp, softens it, and invites canker, crown rot and hungry voles. On heavy clay, fork over the surface lightly before you mulch so the winter rain can still get through. If you use strawy manure, net it down — blackbirds will scatter it across the lawn within a week.

Watch the blossom and the forecast

Blossom frost is the heartbreak of British fruit growing. Early varieties can be in flower by mid-April, and a single clear, still night can take the whole crop. Keep horticultural fleece or old sheets to hand and drape them over wall-trained trees and bushes when a frost is forecast; a double layer buys you two or three degrees, which is often the difference between a crop and none.

Water the ground the evening before a cold night — damp soil holds warmth and releases it slowly — but never water the blossom itself. Potted trees can simply be wheeled into the shed or against a warm wall. Watch for the king blossom, the central flower of each cluster, which produces the largest and best fruit; if that survives, you are winning.

Then keep the sprayer shut

Once the first flowers open, nothing gets sprayed. Bees, hoverflies, solitary mason bees and the odd adventurous wasp are doing your pollinating for free, and a single ill-timed spray can wipe out a whole season's set.

Encourage them instead. Leave the dandelions in the lawn until June, plant comfrey and pulmonaria for early nectar, and put up a bundle of hollow canes for mason bees in a sunny, south-facing spot. A shallow dish of water with a few pebbles gives them somewhere safe to drink.

Pest checks can wait a few weeks. Aphids will arrive, but so will ladybirds and lacewings, and a little patience usually saves you the job. Codling moth and plum moth traps go out in late May, not now, and grease bands should already be in place and still sticky from autumn. Keep an eye out for bullfinches stripping fruit buds, and net them off if they find your best pear.

Do these jobs in the right order and you will spend the summer picking rather than repairing.