Heya! I’m a total noob to fruit growing and need some specific instruction because I’m terrified I’m going to mess up my trees! The pictures show the current state of trees. I know I need to prune but how much? They’re 2 years old and the peach fruits really well. Apples not so much yet. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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Hi, and welcome. I know that as a newbie you might not be able to post more than one picture at a time, but could you plan on posting separate photos of each tree you’re thinking of working on? That will help. You might need several postings to do it, of course.
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More experienced folks will chime in but…
Dormant pruning (late winter) promotes new shoot growth in spring.
Late summer pruning reduces vigor.
I’m not sure what benefit fall pruning would have. You need to make sure the tree won’t try pushing new growth and not have time to harden off the wood before freezing weather.
So I don’t see the benefit of pruning now. I’d wait until a few weeks before spring.
IMHO
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Hi again. Your apple is fairly complicated and it will be easier to read once the leaves are gone. I agree with @Shibumi, no need to rush.
All pruning is ultimately dwarfing but dormant pruning will result in a flush of growth behind the pruning cuts. And summer pruning, as he says, will reduce vigor, by depriving the tree of sugars it could be storing in its roots for next season’s growth.
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Fall pruning is identical to late winter pruning in terms of effect. Especially for apples, it makes no difference to do it as soon as they go dormant, or later in the winter. Just depends on when time is available. I would definitely wait until it’s dormant and leafless, though.
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After several years of losing fruit to frosts, i have followed the advice of one of my local orchards and prune during bloom. Pruning in the fall can hinder hardening, so I’ve been told. Pruning in late winter or early spring stimulates earlier wake up from dormancy and may put trees in danger of late frosts. I summer prune just inward growing branches for peaches and water sprouts on apples. Here is a great peach pruning video from my local orchard.
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In terms of peaches, we prune in the late spring or summer to avoid winter kill. That shouldn’t be an issue in Maryland though. Still, it’s nice to prune after fruit set, so you can somewhat adjust pruning to fruit load.
I’m not going to criticize the video above because commercial growers all prune slightly different. Personally I don’t like allowing peaches to grow as tall as the grower in the vid above. You’ll notice toward the end of his video, he mentions he has to prune some pretty big stuff to get the tree down because it has gotten too tall.
We prefer not to let our trees get that tall, so focus more on keeping them shorter when they are younger. For the peach tree the grower is pruning starting at about 4:15 min., I would have cut those more vertical growing scaffolds down much shorter. I would have taken at least 2 feet off the height of those scaffolds.
Here’s a video I took last year pruning a young peach tree. The vid is poor quality and too long because I was trying to do it perfect for the video. Normally I take about 15 sec to determine what scaffolds to select.
Here is a video I took of the peach part of our ourchard a couple weeks ago. Notice how low the peach trees are. We do our best not to let peach trees get away from us. They will quickly grow out of reach, if you don’t keep them aggressively pruned.
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Thank you for the good information FaithfullFruitsman and Olpea. Always good to get real life experiences on pruning peaches. They are very temperature sensitive. Mine did great this year- the last time I got any peaches from them was from 2021. Late frosts and freezes right at the time if the peach trees blooming. I knew this when I planted the peach trees. Hit or miss. When I get some peaches they are delicious- well worth the wait. I had some many peaches this year I had to give them away to neighbors, friends, and at my wife’s friend’s workplace.
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Video popped up in my feed this morning, thoroughly enjoyed this peak at your orchard!
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Haha. I chuckled Andy when I read your post. It just struck me as funny that anyone would get a notification of a video I uploaded on the YouTube.
I’ll have to try to work on uploading my content more than once a year 
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I agree with you Olpea. I like mine shorter and keep them that way. He runs a big orchard. U pick and then I see them picking for their market from a flat bed. I think that’s why he lets them get higher, but Im just speculating. Looking forward to the 2024 peach evaluation post!!!
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Actually Fruitsman, we had a complete peach bust this year. It happened last January when we had two consecutive days of -13F. One of the nights it stayed at -13F for 6 or 7 hours. There were some broken peach branches which got covered in snow. Those were basically the only ones which bloomed.
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Bummer about no peaches this year for you. I love home grown peaches. They taste so much better than any store bought ones. We get a hit or miss situation with here as well. When we get peaches they are great , if not I miss tasting them.
I really pruned back my peach trees here this spring. Thinned out a lot of branches and cut back some to try and make the trees more manageable. I am sure if the pruning helped to make more peaches or not but I had a bumper crop of peaches. They were smaller than normal because we had so very little rain during the summer. They tasted great though.
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