@Asvmac in case you or anyone else is interested, here is some funky training I’ve done to a reasonably young peach tree.
Here’s a before and after pruning pic I took today of this tree. The second photo is much later in the evening and the sun was going down, so the quality is poor.
But the story behind this tree is that there were minimal scaffolds to select at the height I wanted. There was only one scaffold going one direction, and everything was dead above it. I chose that scaffold with the thought of making that one scaffold into two scaffolds going opposite directions, by choosing shoots going opposite directions.
I did indeed get two shoots going opposite directions on that scaffold (one shoot going north and one going south). I pruned everything else off to turn those shoots into scaffolds. After the next year (I think) I decided that the crotch angles were really terrible on the two shoots/scaffolds going north and south. I thought it would eventually split the tree once it carried a heavy crop load.
Soooo…, I ended up cutting the south shoot (now big enough to be called a scaffold) so that now the tree was back to one scaffold (again).
Today I found a better shoot facing south, so I cut everything else away except the north facing scaffold and a relatively small south facing shoot (with the intent to later make that shoot into a scaffold).
In the end you can see a tree which has this weird horizontal plane and looks terribly unbalanced. But with care, and observation, the tree will very likely eventually balance out with the two scaffolds (one facing north, the other facing south - and will eventually fill in all the empty spaces). Three scaffolds is ideal for a vase shaped peach tree, but two scaffolds will also work.
Here are the before/after pics.
In the after pic below, you can’t see it very well, but there is only one small shoot facing south that I left to eventually become a scaffold. You can get a pretty close up view by left clicking on the picture and left clicking again on the pop up picture.
