After a year of pretty much neglect do to illness I am going around and trying to figure out how am I going to shape some trees. I have read that if a crotch angle is to close it can form a weak point. I’d hate to have the tree split in a few years do to crop load. Should I cut both out or cut one and the other turn into a central leader? Open center?
I would take the largest “branch” and straighten it with a length of metal conduit, taping it to the trunk below in 2 or 3 places to hold the conduit straight and then tape the branch to the conduit making it as straight as possible. Than I’d remove all the branches that are more than half (or third with vigorous varieties) the diameter of the new leader (where the branches meet the leader) and leave the rest until the tree starts bearing. However, that isn’t a terrible crotch because there is no inverted bark so if I didn’t already have other bearing trees I might just train it as an open center tree and summer prune the largest scaffold to try to keep it from dominating the other two or three and use string and stakes to get them to grow somewhat more horizontally.
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If you want open center I would cut the right sided scaffold down to the first secondary branch. It is dominating at this point, almost growing straight up.
Then as Allan said tie all of them down to make more vertical.
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