Just picked a honeycrisp in dire need of prunning

General Fruit Growing
#1

Went to Costco today to pick something else and walked away with a baby Valentine and Cupid cherry bushes and a rather large Honeycrisp apple tree… It was $75, for our neck of the woods in Alaska that would have been a $125+ tree.

1 3/4 trunk, 8-feet tall, looks like it was grown for maximum size/packability ratio for shipment on a pallet of trees. The worst offender is that it got topped at 3’ with two fairly equal leaders going up the rest of the 8 feet. It is fully leafed out with a few flowers that I’m taking out. The question is how aggressive can I get on this guy.

The desire is to chop one of the leaders, top the second leader at around 6’, get rid of the inside smaller branches and top the lateral branches to encourage side growth instead of the up growth it was forced to go with, and start the spreading sticks. The thing is that if I do this I’ll be chopping half the tree.

Yay? Nay?

Unreleased University of Saskatchewan prarie cherries we want & what we know about them contrasted with romance series cherries
#2

Hold on…a Cupid cherry bush??!! I’ve never seen that one for sale in the US. Which Costco? Debarr road?

#3

Yes! $23 a bush! They are not the biggest bushes but I heard they tend to grow :wink:

#4

I’ll see if I can check it out tomorrow. I have to fly out to the village Saturday morning. Those plants move fast they will be gone by the weekend.

Sorry I don’t have anything to add about the apple tree :wink:

#5

No worries. If you can’t make it let me know and I’ll pick and stash a few for you.

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#6

My bare root pink lady from Costco is doing quite good. It is getting many lateral branches. In terms of the honeycrisp tree itself honeycrisp is not known to be a very vigorous tree compared to other apples. Still a amazing tasting apple which is why people grow it. Just not that vigorous.

#7

How about topping and training the secondary leader as a side branch? It is slightly smaller than the one I want as a primary but still large… I’m hoping that once I start training it to go sideways that the height and angle will make it take its role as a side branch?

#8

Good spot on the cherries! I went to the Dimond Costco and they had Valentine and Cupid. There were not many Cupid’s left. I was able to pick one up.

This is the first time I’ve seen Cupid sold anywhere. I got a Valentine last year at Costco. I guess this completes the “series”, excluding Wowza, until the next gen new releases come out.

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#9

Going back to the original topic: how hard a pruning can I get away with? Would attempting to turn one of the two leaders into a branch work?

#10

pictutres would help. also try to judge how many roots are in the root ball.

#11

Too many… I had to get pretty aggressive in order to break it up, slashing on 4 sides so the roots would be encouraged to break out. On that note I also went more aggressive on the pruning given how much disruption the roots took. The tree will have to spend the season sorting itself out. :-\