Hearthome,
I never worry about a peach tree being out of balance and tipping. And very few people on this forum would have more wind than we do here in KS/MO (I’m on the border.) So far, my trees have withstood 60+ mile an hour winds (multiple times) when the ground was at full water saturation. Sometimes I have apple tree bust off at the graft union. The key is keeping them low, which you mentioned was your goal. I will put a qualifier on my claim that you should be aware of. We have heavy soil here, probably unlike VA which has a lot of sand. It’s much easier to dig trees out of sand than out of clayey soil we have (even wet). But you wouldn’t get near the wind we get here. Whenever I’m in SC (assume it’s about the same as VA) I’m shocked at the lack of wind. It almost always blows here, unless it’s the dog days of summer.
The real danger here with peach trees and wind is they will wallow out the hole when young and soil is wet, and bust off all the roots below. I remedy this by pouring sand in the wallowed out hole to firm them up.
I’ve got trees leaning every which way at the farm and they don’t blow over. They either got planted in the hole crooked, or I didn’t like the way the scaffolds were going so I clipped the young trees back to a leaning shoot to make the trunk, or the tree started leaning a little bit before it developed a root structure. Here are a couple pics of trees I have at the house (just stepped out and took photos) leaning or out of balance.
Again, I wouldn’t even blink at lopping off one of those scaffolds on your tree. To me, it’s a lot easier to just train a tree right rather than manage around a poorly trained tree with dual trunks.
The tree above is really out of balance, but it will fill in the other side. Peach trees grow fast in the space where there’s lot’s of sunlight.
I disagree (sort of) with the assessment that your tree has some problems with canker. It may have canker (I’m not seeing it, but it’s possible.) To me your tree looks healthy. Another qualifier is that I don’t live that far north, and we have long growing seasons here, which, so far, have rendered canker a non-issue. Even if a tree gets canker, they never die from it. The vigor of the tree stays ahead of the canker. VA is probably the same in that regard. If I lived further north, I’m sure my opinion would change.
Here is a close up view of the pic above of the tree out of balance. The bark looks bad, but it used to look worse. A couple years ago, I pruned this as a young tree before a really bad cold spell and it killed one side of the tree, including the bark on that side. It looked horrible. The bark has slowly grown back, and I suspect by the end of this season, it will finally just about close up.
I gave it a shot of N fertilizer (top dress) the other day to help it fill in, which will also help close the wound. But I’m really not worried about the wound.