Moving on to older trees, these trees have been in the ground for two years and are starting
their third growing season.
We start our training and pruning.
Look at the center of the tree.
The first thing we must do is identify our primary scaffold branches.
We have one, two, three, and four.
If you want to maintain this scaffold branch growth out at approximately a forty-five degree
angle, so they can tolerate fruit crop load.
The first thing we’ll do is identify this scaffold branch that’s coming out right
here.
So, we want to get rid of competition using loppers.
And you’ll notice that as we’re using larger trees we use, are using loppers now.
Loppers, these have thirty-two inch handles.
Again they are by-pass pruners similar to our hand shears that we were using, but they
allow us to cut larger growth within the tree.
So, as we look at the scaffold branch coming out, we’re maintaining the forty-five degree
angle.
We’ll come in and head this one an outward growing bud.
Again, we’ve made that heading cut to stiffen this branch to tower a fruit load as well
as to encourage more branching back in here in which you will have the fruit in coming
years.
We’ll get rid of growth that’s growing on the bottom of this branch that will be
shaded.
So we would cut the underneath branch we cut out.
Anything growing on top of the branch we’ll also eliminate that will be shading other
growth.
Branches coming out we maintain from the side here to be fruity with.
We’ll maintain them.
With your odd branch, we’ll cut them back by about a third as well, so that we can maintain
the fruit load on these stiffened branches.
Okay, this scaffold branch coming out as well.
We have a heading cut that was made there.
We have three very vigorous branches at the tip.
We will select that down to one with the branch growing in the orientation in the direction
that we would want.
So, we eliminate the competition there.
Growth growing underneath we’ll get rid of that will be shaded.
And then the growth growing on top that would be shading, we also remove.
These scaffold branches coming up, again we will cut to an outward growing bud to maintain
the growth of that branch.
This scaffold branch over here that’s coming out, we need to fork them when we move from
the tree.
In order to fill our lot of space of sixteen to eighteen foot between trees, we’ll have
our scaffold branch coming out.
And then we allow it to a fork in two directions so it can fill a greater area.
So, we have our scaffold branch here with a fork in it coming up in this direction.
Eliminate the competition coming out.
Cut the branches underneath that are being shaded, and those on top that are shading.
And continuing up, we will cut to an outward growing branch to maintain the growth of this
scaffold branch.
Yet with this tree we have a scaffold branch coming out.
This is a little too upright.
It’s going to the wind, so we need to direct this one more outward.
So, that we have, maintain the open center, light in the center of the tree.
Again we get rid of growth underneath and that growing on top.
What we also need to do is the red wood, which is the most productive wood, we need to come
back and cut those back by a third, to stiffen those branch, branches and to eliminate excess
of flowers.
On peach trees, one of the things that determines where we will make our cuts is where the fruit
is formed.
If we were to look at our mature peach tree, we are looking at shoots that are eighteen
to twenty-four inches long, are red in color.
For the eastern peach varieties, we have a very high bloom density, which means we have
many flowers onto the tree, which will allow us to lose some for frost and freeze and still
have a full crop.
If we were to look at a shoot like this, approximately eighteen inches long, it has approximately
thirty-five flower buds on it.
When in actuality this branch could only support at the most four peaches.
If we were to look closely at the peach shoot, at every node if you will, there is a bud.
If there is only one bud at that node, that is going to be a leaf bud.
Each node will have at least one leaf bud.
But if we look at other ones, we may have two flower buds there, with a flower bud on
the outside here, a flower bud on the outside here.
But in the center is a leaf bud.
If we look at these shoots up and down you see how many flower buds we would have.
So, when we were pruning peach trees many times we will make a heading cut.
On a shoot like this we may come back and cut it by a third in order to stiffen that
branch to eliminate some bloom that our growers are going to have to remove during their thinning
season.
And then we allow this branch to be stiffened out to tolerate at least three peaches.
So on a peach tree; we will make many heading cuts.
If we were to try that on an apple tree, when we cut off the tips, we would cut off all
the fruit on that apple tree with no crop at all.
For more information on training and pruning fruit trees, you can refer to this publication
published by the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service.
And it can be found on the website at the bottom of this screen.