Every June, I walk out to the moringa rows with a pair of loppers and cut the trees back. Hard. The whole row, one after another, working my way down until they're all done.

People who see it for the first time think something went wrong.

Nothing went wrong. That's pollarding, and it's one of the main reasons our moringa powder is as good as it is.

What pollarding is

Pollarding is a pruning method that goes back centuries. You cut a tree or shrub back to the same point repeatedly, year after year. The plant responds by pushing out a flush of new growth from those cut points. Lots of tender young stems, lots of leaves, all at once.

For moringa, it works especially well. Left to grow unchecked, moringa will put most of its energy into height. The trunk gets woody, the leaves move further up and further out of reach, and the leaf quality drops as the plant shifts toward reproduction. You end up with a tall tree that's hard to harvest and not producing the kind of leaf you want.

Cut it back, and the tree redirects. All that energy goes into new growth. The leaves that come in after a pollard cut are some of the most nutrient-dense the tree will produce all season.

When we cut

We do it in late May or early June, once the trees have put on enough growth to be worth cutting. By that point most of them are chest to head high on me, and the canopy has

filled in thick. You can see in the photos what a full row looks like right before the cut. It's a lot of green.

The timing matters. Cut too early and you're not getting much. Cut too late in the season and you're shortening the window for regrowth. June is the sweet spot here in Crenshaw County.

This is the summer cut. It's not the only time we cut, and it's not the end of the season. The way we manage these trees runs across the full year.

How the full cycle works

The summer cut in June is what most people see. We take the trees back hard, harvest the branches, strip the leaves, and the trees push out new growth within a few weeks.

In fall, when the season winds down, we do the big harvest. We pull all the remaining leaves off the trees, then cut them back to the ground. All the way down.

Come spring, they come back up from the root. Moringa does that here in zone 8. The root system overwinters and the plant shoots up again, sometimes faster than you'd expect. We planted our first trees around 2015, and the root systems on the older ones are well established now. They know what they're doing.

That cycle, cut back in summer, harvest and cut to ground in fall, come back up in spring, is what lets us keep a productive planting year after year without starting over.

How we do the summer cut

I use a pair of long-handled loppers for most of the work. The moringa stems are soft and fast-growing, not like pruning an oak or a peach tree. A clean cut takes a second or two per stem.

I work down the row and cut each tree back to where I want the new growth to come from. The branches I take off go into crates and come straight inside, where the leaves

get stripped off the stems by hand. That's its own whole process, and I wrote about it in the follow-up post.

The cut trees look bare when I'm done. That's normal. Give them two to three weeks and you'll see new shoots coming off every node along the remaining trunk. Within a month the row looks full again.

What it means for the powder

The leaves we harvest right after a pollard cut are young and tender. They dry down well, they powder cleanly, and the color comes out bright. That bright green color in our moringa powder isn't a processing trick. It's what happens when you start with the right leaf at the right time.

We've been working with these trees since 2015. The pollarding practice has been part of the system from early on. It's how we keep the yield up and the quality consistent on a small farm where every tree matters.

A note on the photos

These shots are from our June 2026 cut. You can see the trees at full height before we started, the loppers working through the row, and the crates of cut branches heading inside. The moringa in our leaf powder, capsules, and teas came through a cycle just like this one.

If you want to see what happens after the cut, hand-stripping, drying, and powdering, that post is here.

And if you want to try the moringa itself, you can find our Alabama-grown moringa leaf powder in the shop.