Ton of branches and very narrow crotch angles. Difficult to tell from pictures but lowest branch is probably 3.5’ above ground level. Ultimately I’d like an open center / delayed oc but I’m not sure where to start here. If there was no growing fruit message board I might to do something like this:
Top the tree a red mark, remove all branches marked with yellow, and leave scaffolds marked in blue. (edit - I’d probably remove that bottom blue branch also).
Actually some of your stronger crotch angels are on the lower scaffolds. So I am wondering why you have it fenced? If you have a deer issue, why top it so low? It’s a bit confusing from those two perspectives. Perhaps clarify your environmental issues so that other members can help you realize your goals.
If it were mine I would keep most of the stronger lower scaffolds but maybe tip prune them after you thin out to about 3-4” between each scaffold. Then top it about 8’ high and remove all the recent sharp angel crotches, so future growth buds can be trained more towards a horizontal direction.
Hope this gives you the idea to refine your main concerns
Dennis
Kent, wa
Dennis - you’re right, the lower scaffolds do have the more broad crotch angles. The issue(?) is that I re-measured and the lowest is only 24" from the ground. Lots of deer in the area so I fence everything for the first several years. Maybe having that lower scaffold will not matter in long run as it grows out and up and but this is my first experience with plum so don’t have much to go on. I thought to top where marked to encourage the vegetative energies out and up rather than focused straight up.
@IL847 that cut would be very low to the ground, maybe 2’ & 3/4" but you got me thinking.
My limited experience with plum says that young plums love to grow. Point being, you can prune a lot away and the plum will keep giving you new opportunities, so you don’t need to be perfect all the time. I had a prune plum that I ended up pruning into a corkscrew shape and it was a very neat tree until an unfortunate encounter with an excavator during a sewer project. Now I have one grafted onto nanking cherry that I prune as a vase, and it decided to send a central leader up through the middle, so there’s another set of options for me. I have another on sucker roots that is a gangly central leader that’s now sending up suckers. It just loves to grow.
I made the mistake of grafting too high early on in my effort to avoid deer. I’d like my first branches at least a couple of feet below where I want to pick fruit. That may mean protecting the tree for 2 or 3 years to allow it to grow up and out and have enough canopy above deer browse.
But at about 5 feet and above, the deer leave the leaves and fruit (if the branches are rigid).
I grafted at 5-7 feet and had fruit starting way too high in the canopy.
Unless you are going to permanently fence/protect the tree from deer, then you’ll need to start your scaffolds much higher than 2 feet IMO.
I say this from my experience with a Red Heart Japanese plum I pruned to an open vase. I started with four main scaffolds around the 2 foot height. I protected the tree with fencincing for a couple of years and figured that was good. I was wrong, the deer ripped one of my scaffolds off and now it is only a 3 scaffold open center tree. The deer browsed off all the lower branches on this tree so it now only has growth on the tips of its long gangly scaffolds.
The deer basically ruined this tree for production. I’m in the process of grafting this tree over to give it lower scaffolds but not so low that the deer destroy my grafting efforts. Unfortunately live and learn, deer are my worst enemies on my property.
Thank you all for the ideas. I spend a few minutes with this tree most days assessing options. Is there any issue with just doing nothing for another year? Or better to start sooner than later?
Better to start sooner, I would thin the side branches mercilessly down to the best spaced/angled 3-5 and keep the apical top shoot. Is it Toka? Very vigorous variety!
Deer? If you also have coons and/or squirrels, you may want to eventually have at least 4.5’ of trunk before your first permanent scaffolds.
Why worry about crotch angles when you have so many temporary branches below to tie your permanent scaffolds to a more horizontal position (say 65 degrees). Most J. plum varieties never give you adequately spreading branches on their own.
I train hundreds of J and E plums and they are easy besides their common reluctance to produce secondary wood. For that I am patient but some cut annual growth back a bit and then retrain the scaffold leader to dominate the other two secondary branches you leave at the point of the stub cut. Summer pruning is the best way to do this.
As far as your temp branches- start thinning them, just remove about half of them so they aren’t so crowded. Or not. The main thing is making sure your permanent scaffolds can dominate once they are selected. You prune whatever is in the way.
