Bill Shane recommends selecting peach scaffolds the second year from grafted trees. But there are a lot of extraneous issues to consider.
Honestly, most of the time I purchase peach trees, the trees have almost no live buds where I want to start scaffolds. Many times I end up finding a live bud low on the trunk and using that bud to start a new trunk, so I can have live, viable buds to choose scaffolds. Of course that delays scaffold selection.
Then there is the consideration of how vigorous your new peach tree is growing. If the peach tree is racing ahead like a giant ragweed, then I think careful scaffold selection could commence the first season. But if the peach tree is growing about as fast as an oak tree, then that will slow scaffold selection considerably.
I think the same applies to seedling peaches. Here, where seedling peaches are in a raised, weed free planting, with good moisture and fertilized, they will grow quite fast the first season. Seedlings here will grow to 4’ or more the first season, if cared for. If that’s the case, you may well find some scaffolds at the correct height which are less than 1/3 the diameter of the trunk.
Correct scaffold to trunk size ratio is really the most important consideration, not the amount of time the tree has been in the dirt.
One advantage of selecting scaffolds a little later is that the vigorous upright top growth will tend to spread the lower growth more outward, so that the angles are a little nicer when selecting the lower scaffolds (if that makes any sense).
I think it’s fine to pull scaffolds down to fix their angle, and I used to do that a lot. But as I’ve slowly become more and more of a “commercial grower”, labor has become everything for a labor intensive crop like peaches. If I can shave some labor off the process, I can plant and take care of more trees and produce more fruit.
It’s hard to make a profit and we are driven by customers who demand a tasty fruit at the lowest possible price. I’m not complaining. I’m selling food in the country which spends the least amount of their disposable income on food than any other country in the world, even though several other countries have surpassed the U.S. in per capita income. Americans are bred to expect cheap food.
I have to look for ways where labor gets the max return. It’s much less labor intensive to simply let the new peach tree throw out all its growth, then come back and select scaffolds by pruning out all the stuff which is overly vigorous and growing at an undesirable angle. In that case, I may prune off 75% or more of the peach tree to get desired scaffolds. That takes a minuscule amount of labor compared to tying down scaffolds. Of course this is a mute point when one has the time to train scaffolds using strings vs. training scaffolds by pruning.