ACNH Tree Growth Stage & How to Stunt Tree Growth in Animal Crossing

The tree is an essential part of your Animal Crossing New Horizons island, there are some trees generated once you start the game, but you can grow more trees to get different ACNH items from them. In this article, we’ll introduce the ACNH tree growth stage, and how to stunt tree growth in Animal Crossing if you want to keep them small?

Animal Crossing New Horizons Tree Guide - ACNH Tree Growth Stage

Once you planted a tree, it will grow within 3 days, if the tree can bear fruit, it will produce fruit the day after the tree is fully grown, for a total of 4 days since planting. All trees have five stages of growth: nursery, small young, medium young, large young, and fully grown. The tree reaches full maturity on the fifth day. 

First Day (Stage 1): Nursery

Second Day (Stage 2): Small

Third Day (Stage 3): Medium

Fourth Day (Stage 4): Large

Fifth Day (Stage 5): Adult

How to Stop Trees From Growing in ACNH - How to Keep Trees Small in ACNH

Trees need a 3*3 tile empty area around themselves to grow, if it is blocked or the area is taken by other things, it can’t grow into the next stage. So a useful trick to freezing trees in time or stunting their growth is to plant a fruit sapling directly in a space next to or behind it, to keep it stay at the current stage. It’s recommended to do behind, that way when you go like this, you can’t really see that the saplings are there with the tree over there. As an extra precaution, you can plant two fruit trees. You can intentionally stop the trees from growing at whatever stage you want. Simply summarize, allow the tree to grow to the desired stage and plant a fruit sapling directly next to the tree, within the 3*3 tile area around it. A blocking tree is any tree at the same growth stage or higher as the tree being evaluated starting at stage 2.

Trees won't grow if they were planted in a square adjacent to buildings, walls, water,  cliffs, inclines, bridges, and beaches or other hard obstacles including other trees, if planted in these areas, tree saplings will die the day after and disappear. But trees that have started or finished growing will not die naturally. Trees can be relocated in New Horizons, if you need to move them, an axe is necessary, after eating a piece of fruit, you will be able to dig up a whole tree, and plant them where you want.