I’m hoping to leverage the knowledge of everyone here, since I have really little idea what I’m doing! I bought two apple trees in Houston and planted them (probably in the wrong season) but they somehow survived that mistreatment… Queue Monty Python “I’m not dead yet!” They are probably 3-5 years old, and both very long and whip-like branches.
Anyway, one of the trees has a challenging structure to my untrained eye, and I’ve been reading about central leader vs open center… and I’m not sure what to do with one of the trees I’ve got. I haven’t cut any of the growing wood (just wanted it to get some time to establish before winter), but since I’ve got about a month left in Houston’s “winter” I am hoping to get some advice as to which limbs should be pruned and how much (if leaving anything.)
Here is my attempt to photograph the limbs…
From the front:
The yellow branch looks to me like it should probably come off. As the yellow and the red branch (red looks like a better central leader to me) continue to increase in diameter they’re going to squish each other and the yellow one will probably end up ‘pruning’ itself under a load of fruit. I’d take off the top blue branch. It’s growing more vertically and going to shade out the lower portion of the blue branch.
I’d take off one side of the red branch after it forks, but maybe save that for Summer or next Winter pruning. As taking off the yellow branches and a portion of the blue branch this Winter would be a significant portion of the total tree.
The angle between the red and yellow branch is to small. And will almost certainly yield to a weak connection due to bark inclusion (bark getting stuck and braking the connection of wood on the topside of the branche once it thickens up)
So regardless of anything else, you either want to reset it’s angle via some tree surgery. Or cut off the yellow branche.
For the rest of the pruning i would start with what rootstock your have?
What tree shape do you want, Do you want to walk under it? Do you want to prune/harvest fruit without a ladder? How much space sideways do you have?
Pruning the tree is basically making the tree suit your needs/wishes. You have to figure out those needs/wishes before you start pruning.
PS i really like your idea of colored lines on the branches. Makes everything a lot easier to communicate!
I have trained all my apple trees so far to standard central leader… but i expect that the modified central leader would work well to.
My 20+ year old Early Mc apple has no limbs (scaffold branches) until 7 ft up the tree… i have deer… but they cant reach the apples at that height or above.
If you have deer… as low as your tree is you may never get any apples from it.
You can cut off the lower branches and force it to grow taller… and then produce your first scaffold branches at a height that works for you.
Check the images… doing central leader is not that complicated… you can do it.
Also when you do decide on scaffold branches you need to look into how to bend branches so they develop strong branch crotch area that will support fruit load.
Best of luck.
Check out the vid by skilcult… he recommends a delayed open branches method and demonstrates it. I may try that with some of my new trees.
He covers nicely things not to do… that cause problems.
@evilpaul@marknmt that confirms my suspicions about the yellow/red branches having too small of an angle to be recoverable - you can kinda see where they had the two branches tied together in the 2nd picture.
@oscar, I have no idea the rootstock that is being used, this was just from a local nursey on deep discount (I want to say like $15 or so…), so I thought I’d give it a try. Right now the tallest part of the red/yellow branches is only about 7ft from ground level, so there is still height that can be gained. Some good questions there for me to consider.
@TNHunter I’m in an urban area, so no risk of deer! I’ll watch the video and give it some thought.
