I never misquoted you and repeatedly referred to your advice on “seedling” root stock as it being not an option often used here. That is not a misquote- most N. American growers do not use it.
I’m not here to evaluate or claim expertise, my only goal is to help this forum provide useful and accurate information.
It is my opinion that Mazzard or any "standard’ rootstock is practically worthless to growers here when not carefully managed, if the intent is to harvest a lot of cherries- I work on several properties with giant cherry trees on Mazzard and the customers rarely get cherries from the trees, although the birds enjoy them immensely. Most of the quality fruit is way too high to efficiently harvest- even on low-bird pressure seasons. .
Trees that aren’t netted here rarely provide crops for people.
Please don’t take offense as my contradictory comments. I am incapable of speaking a second language and consider your efforts highly commendable. My intention isn’t to belittle you, just to get facts straight and thorough.
All this arguing about chat gpt and rootstocks! It seems one person says the Colt rootstocks are vigorous growers and i can prune less vigorously to a reasonable end, and the other side seems to say the rootstock doesn’t matter, i have to chop out basically all the last two years of growth since i planted these two trees, hope they survive, and then train what is left to be more horizontal?
Sorry to create confusion but I wholeheartedly believe, if you look close enough the correct answer will always be „it depends…“. It‘s your tree and you can maie the choice
Yes Rubus, it depends, but i don’t have the knowledge or experience to know what the outcomes might be given my choice. I just have mostly two people who seem more intent on having an argument than on providing insight on pros and cons of more aggressive vs less aggressive pruning. Or maybe you both have, and i missed it. I definitely feel stuck.
This is a forum in which questions are answered for the benefit of the entire group. I was not trying to win an argument so much as to clarify information submitted. You should be grateful for what you are getting for free and simply scroll down what is of no interest to you, IMO. People who take the effort of other people to give advice for granted are one reason I no longer regularly participate in this forum. This sense of entitlement seems to be an epidemic attitude on the internet, so please don’t feel I’m specifically pointing a finger at you.
Here’s what I think you should do- let the tree grow as much as possible but read my article in the guides section about pruning by numbers. It will inform you that first you need to choose a single dominant leader to be the trunk, or at least, that is what I recommend. Cherries tend to produce trees with 3 or more equally vigorous leaders that create a weak union as they push against each other and can break off.
You can remove the competing leaders leaving the most dominant and straight one or you can leave all of them but cut the less desirable ones back about half way and continue to enforce their sub-dominance with summer pruning. .It all depends on how close to the ground you want to start your scaffolds and whether you want the extra work of summer pruning, which isn’t much work.
The less you prune the faster the trees can become productive-as a general guideline. . .
However, if squirrels and raccoons are an issue where you are, you may want to train the trees so they have a straight trunk with about 5 branch free feet from the ground so you can put a baffle up to stop them from taking fruit. Both will sometimes tear up nets to get their food.
I certainly do not feel entitled, and am very grateful that the combined experience of a number of you has come to bear. I hope you can understand that from my perspective, it is very difficult to glean a course of action, and that is what i was expressing. I participate in a number of fora in which i am an expert, where i do try to be helpful to those coming up.
All that said, now i am more confused than ever, as i thought summitorchard, minnesotaapricot, and others were advocating for cutting out the main leader, and then cutting back the other branches aggressively. So it’s not just a matter of how much to prune, but whether the main leader(s) should be allowed to exist. But if i understand your most recent post, all of the above is wrong. One main leader should be allowed to grow, and everything else should be minimally pruned.
I’m terribly confused. I’ll try to find the article you referenced, and perhaps it will clarify.
I’m flying out of town this afternoon and had hoped to be able to do this before then, as the trees have just broken bud, and i understand it is best to prune in winter or before much growth happens, so i thought better not to wait a few weeks if i can help it. Oh well.
Again, I do appreciate everyone weighing in. Perhaps i simply don’t have enough basic understanding of the subject to be able to make head or tail of the various opinions (which, to me, seem quite contradictory). I really am doing my best.
Yes- that’s the one, and just run with the advice you are most comfortable with. Maybe it will bring you comfort to know that I spend more time pruning fruit trees than anyone you are ever likely to meet, that I buy cherry trees by the bundle and train them in my nursery along with other species I grow and that I do not disregard other relatively reliable sources of information that are derived from university guidelines. Chat is the quickest way to find that info and it will provide you with the original source which might be hard to gather through all the advertising on other search engines.
I would run with Chat before 90% of the advice given on this forum
These growers instruct their workers to remove any branch that exceeds 1/3 the diameter of the trunk at its point of attachment to the trunk. Until a tree begins to bear fruit all other branches are left on the tree except rubbing or broken branches. Permanent scaffolds are not selected until trees begin to bear fruit.
… in my case I should basically trim off all the large branches that have grown from the trunk in the last two years, and then assess again next winter? Seems like the rest of the article(s) have to do with more details, and more mature trees.
Yes, you have it right, except it isn’t always in your best interest to remove oversized branches completely if you are willing to follow up after reducing them. Sometimes they are harvesting light that would otherwise be wasted. In the case of choosing permanent scaffolds, an oversized diameter branch can be subdued so it is no longer oversized after a season or two if you do a couple of summer prunes of shoots to reduce its vigor after a dormant prune to reduce its reach. If you want to start branching where oversized branches already are, you can keep them in a reduced state and even if you eventually eliminate the leader entirely you will make the connections stronger by subdominating them for a couple of seasons. Or you can use the lower branches as temps to help the tree grow faster and develop a stronger trunk, (increasing its taper, it’s called).
On the other hand, the simplest approach is to eliminate all over sized diameter branches right away and give up a bit of vigor. This is what I always do when I’m planting small bare root trees at least for the first two years when building the scaffold structure. Sometimes when training peaches and cherries it saves time to violate that rule on the 2nd year. However when you try to bend such peach branches to a more horizontal habit you may break them if you aren’t careful.
I‘d say, do what Alan said here Cherry pruning help - #26 by alan
But I would personally rather go the route of reducing/subdueing the side branches instead of cutting them off at the trunk.
From a tree longevity point of view I don‘t agree with cutting branches that exceed 1/3 diameter of the trunk. You can read Alex Shigo if you want to understand the science behind it, but when they already reached 1/3 of the diameter, it is kind of too late, you basically have to prune them BEFORE they reach 1/3, OR if you really want to get rid of them, keep subdueing them so over the years so the trunk grows more in diameter than them and they have a more favourable diameter relation (below 1/3)
(yes that might not apply to orchards where tree longevity and commercial interests don‘t necessarily overlap)
I have read Alex Shigo’s books and he was a brilliant man but somewhat twisted scientifically because of an excessively idealistic bent, IMO. I was at a lecture he gave to fruit tree growers where he admonished us not to top trees! Fruit trees!
His research about tree topping primarily involved only two species and somehow he failed to observe that in the forest trees are frequently topped by weather events such as early snows while they are sill in leaf or high winds. Redwoods are often topped naturally and continue to live for many many centuries. Any healthy tree can withstand the stress of being topped but the problem arises when it sends out a riot of competing branches at the point of the break-all weakly connected. This is not a problem for fruit growers. For homeowners topping forest trees is a different issue, of course. It can be managed but crown reduction requires much less repeat maintenance.
I appreciate how much he added to our understanding of wound healing, but like a lot or researchers he exaggerated the importance of his own research which was mainly focused on developing a useful pruning wound compound. Of course, he decided that there was no such thing in most cases. Orchardists knew this before his research, I think.
As far as pruning wounds on young trees, they are usually harmless and after a few years are completely “healed” over with new bark. I manage many over century old apple trees on seedling rootstock that have lost huge scaffolds at their base due to poor management that allowed excessive shading low in the trees, even unattended trees in the forest abandon such shaded branches and usually manage to ward off excessive rot. It contributes to rot at the base of apple trees but often is never the cause of their demise- more often it seems to be just old age and root failure that does them in. If the tree breaks at the point of a dead scaffold allowing rot it is probably the result of poor management even after the branch died.
I recommend Richard Harris’s book on arboriculture. He is not a cult leader and sticks to the science- not just his own research.
I appreciate your insights. You are far older than me and obviously have a far longer experience span. As with a lot of things in nature, I am convinced they are very hard to grasp fully for humans because they happen in periods of time that are longer than our lifetimes. So obviously, I have never pruned a branch off a tree and then looked at the tree 60 years later, simply because I haven‘t lived that long.
My gut still tells me on average less big wounds on a tree will lead to a longer life. I will take a look at Richard Harris. Thanks again!
Here is my Stella tree on Colt. It is 7 years old and is approximately 6’ tall. First 3 years I lightly pruned to shape, then have taken about 20% off each year to keep it a manageable height. I’ve grafted Bing, Rainier and Black Tartarian last year.
When I was in my youth I believe I was ideological to a fault and tried to force the world and nature into that box, and I’ve been making my living with hands in the soil my entire adult life.
Before I moved to NY in my later '20’s my growing experience was limited to CA and a lot of it was with pot although I did some work on fruit trees including on my orchard on my father’s land- when I was attending college I also maintained a vegetable garden for my father and his wife. You can sustain a myth based gardening reality when growing easy crops in an easy climate. When I moved to the east coast and started focusing on fruit trees mother nature bit my ass. I failed as an organic orchardist here as it was long before the advent of Surround.
I studied at the NYBG school of horticulture and had a teacher who was a Shigo enthusiast (cult member ) but I spent a lot of time in their huge library where I discovered Harris’s book. To me it was in another league from all the other arboriculture books in their library. I showed it to my teacher and noticed a few years later that instead of Shigo’s book he was using Harris’s in his class.
I think the trees will work out fine, but maybe it would all happen sooner if they weren’t competing with turf. When I’m establishing trees I keep a weed and grass free ring of about a 5’-6 diameter around their trunks. I keep a layer of woodchips in that ring about 3-4" deep pulled away from trunks. When planting I do so high and then use 5 cubic feet of yard and/or woodchip compost before spreading the same of woodchips or fancy shredded wood mulch. My trees usually establish themselves very quickly.
In good soil, most established trees can grow well with mowed turf, but very young trees are not good competitors.
) but I spent a lot of time in their huge library where I discovered Harris’s book. To me it was in another league from all the other arboriculture books in their library. I showed it to my teacher and noticed a few years later that instead of Shigo’s book he was using Harris’s in his class.