Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm
I'm about to go have a look at my apple trees on the farm here and I've given them a fair amount of neglect in
The past but it's still dormant season now
So I have some time to catch up on some pruning and there's a bit of a tricky situation
I want to try to address on one of these trees. I'll show you what it is
Looking at the winter pruning of my apple trees and as you can see these trees were poorly supported
Early on and ended up with this
not-so-subtle lean in the direction that the wind pushes them during the growing season, so
That's what I'm going to address - not on this tree, but there's one that's much much worse
And here it is you could see that main trunk that began to develop
was like on a 45 degree angle to the ground just
really really rough and consequently
You can see all this sideways branches coming out from the base there and I showed a picture of this
to one of my friends who ran an orchard in
Romania and he
Made a recommendation that he said it might seem like it's really extreme, but it's to take a cut
just before or just after that one rather vertical shoot on the far left and
See if you can get that to form
into a
new trunk
Of course that will leave quite a large injury
To the base. And so I'm very curious to see how this turns out
I'm gonna take that cut now and then we'll see I'm taking it from the other side here
Using a pruning saw that is not a perfect pruning saw but it is what I have on hand and I've sprayed it with
Disinfectant to make sure that I don't spread any diseases, so kind of a tricky one to approach here
because
Normally the rule is you try to cut along the collar, but of course, I'm trying to take off this part
Here which has no collar. So I'm going to go instead for more or less a
Vertical cut running from here down to there maybe with a slight angle on it
But somewhere along those lines there and just to make it as clean as I can the first thing I'm going to do
Is try to clear out a little space underneath
and cut it from the bottom and
cutting it from the bottom just to
Score it and make sure that it comes off cleanly without stripping bark down to the ground
And now with it scored I switch to the top, let's see if I can make a straight cut down
All right, that's the cut
Not perfect on this bottom end, but it clean off clean enough anyway
And I'll give you an overview look of how it looks now
All right, here it is
that's the
main section of the tree now
lying on the ground and
Here's a look at what's remaining
and it is
Fairly vertical
with some decent branching up higher I
See here that there's another
Shoot coming from way down low and it kind of
Whines strangely around the new trunk
so I
Can't have that
So now that's gone
This is clearly the kind of video that requires some follow-up to see how it turns out, but I would be very curious to hear
For other people who know more about fruit trees than I do
But whether they think that that's extreme of a well, I guess it's a low down heading (topping cut)
could be successful or what you think the chances are and
even a piece of advice on
whether or how I should top this now to make a good form tree in the future, so
Hope I can hear from you in the comments