How should I prune my peach espalier?

General Fruit Growing
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I have a three-year-old peach in fan espalier. (Pictures attached; entire tree and left and right sides.) The upright shoots have put out laterals. What should I do with these laterals?

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Well, I cut off the laterals coming from the vertical shoots leaving stubs with 2 - 3 leaves. My understanding is that the vertical shoots, being new growth, will produce fruit next year.
Now my question for next year is: should I remove the vertical shoots, leaving stubs with 2 - 3 leaves?

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Well,that’s cool.I’ve never seen an espalier done with a Peach tree.No help from me though.

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I’ll show a picture of my peach espalier before I prune it again so you can see what they do. I didn’t thin much at all, and that’s a little embarrassing, lol. The branches want to lean over badly, which I had forgotten to consider heavily when starting. (I made mine on a whim from a $10 Walmart peach :grin:)

It’s worked well, tho! Imagine peaches popping up about anywhere you leave new wood. Know that they’re heavy. Know the top wants to grow more vigorously than the bottom. Your wire setup is much better than what I have, so that’s very good!

See, next year is where you’ll have to make choices, yeah. Where is your new wood going to be? I’ll take a picture tomorrow to show how my choices turned out. They’re hard to explain without seeing the tree.

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The pictures were backlit, smh. There are a couple that might be good for something. Hale Haven:

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@Cafeaulait How will you prune it? Where will you make the cuts?

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Here is a couple pages from the book RHS Pruning & Training:

If clicking on the images doesn’t let you zoom in, they might look better if you right click and click “view image” or “open in new tab”.

How to train / prune a peach fan:

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I bring down those long shoots/small laterals until they look aesthetically pleasing, remembering that they are where the fruit will be. I never cut any entirely off, so that the main framework will continue to put on growth there in the future. If they get too fat, I do take them down to a couple of buds. I want the fattest wood to be the espalier shape.

This spring many flowers got frozen out, so I was able to cut lots of those branchlets down to make new wood this season. If there was only one peach on a long one, I cut it back, too.

Then the part you can’t really see (I’ll get better pictures): I have replacement verticals tied to the big verticals. I didn’t use them this year because the big verticals were so productive. I will probably keep two small verticals each year (including a replacement one) renewing the replacement every year. So you have: 1) fat verticals with peaches on branchlets that get renewed when they don’t have many peaches (aiming for renewing half), 2) a thin vertical with peaches from this spring, and 3) a new growing thin vertical that will have peaches next year.

I’m going to keep the original fat, sturdy verticals as long as they work, too. That’s all in there now, tied together, and it looks really good after pruning, I think.

Good enough for me, anyway, and the neighbor really likes it. She mows right beside it. I did an espalier there where I used to only have the wisteria so that it would be skinny enough to not cross the property line.

I’m open to critiques on mine, too, definitely. I just did this to see what happens/if it will work well enough.

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Thank you for the info from the book. However, i do not the the the book is helpful because it deals with fan shaped trees whereas mine has been pruned to a two cordon Upright Fruiting Offshoot (UFO) system.