Heavy pruning Peach

[Olpea]

Congrats on the healthy peach tree.

It can be a bit hard to advise, but Scott gave you some good advice, imo.

I generally just keep mature peach trees pruned at the level I don’t want to reach past. Pretty much, if we can’t reach it from the ground, we prune it. So I think you’ll be OK to prune your scaffolds at 1/2 the length they are now.

It will obviously decrease your harvest vs. not pruning aggressively, but you need to get that tree in shape, if you are going to try to keep it at a pedestrian height.

I have posted several before and after pics of pruning we do. But this is the only one I could find quickly.

Thinning vs poor fruit set

This is obviously an old thread, but since I was pruning today I thought I’d show something perhaps interesting. In post 17 above I showed a pic of a tree I had severely pruned this spring (not the second pic in post 38, but the first pic, post 17). I had quite a few trees like the one in 17, trees which hardly had any fruit, and were pruned to remove any shoots which were blank. I’ve been doing fall pruning for a couple weeks now and noticed a lot of the trees are unrecognizable from the but…

I don’t know if you’ve watched the vids of Mike Parker from NCSU, but he has 3 of them for different staged peach trees. They are pretty good. Here is pruning for a new peach tree.

Pruning a Young Peach Tree