M111…did i head off TOO short?

[markalbob]

I have a st edmunds russet I was extremely happy with last year, it made a grocery bag full of absolute apples. The problem is I just saw some concerns about starting m111 headed back to aggressively, The tree I have is branching about 6 inches above the soil line.

My intention was for this to be my “russet tree” with eight or 10 russets and hopefully all of them producing more than just a few apples… Is this thing likely to be horribly runted out for life?

Yes I know it needs pruning, but now I’m debating whether I need to start over if I’m looking to get more than a couple grocery bags of apples in total

The top of the tallest branch on the tree, for reference, is probably about 6 1/2 feet tall, Most of the tree is closer to 4 1/2

[alan]

Nope, you don’t have to start over, but I would recommend not using more than 4 scaffolds- 3 is probably better for most varieties. You need to leave adequate room for secondary tertiary branching where fruit will ultimately be primarily born. This can be hard to see when trees are young but becomes painfully obvious later when you have an excess of big wood, especially scaffolds.

I’ve often had to temporarily deform mature trees because there is no balanced option for reducing the number of scaffold branches. Eventually relative symmetry can be achieved, especially with pomes, but I refuse to sustain a form where inadequate room is provided for smaller wood. The goal of the informed pruner it to use the least structural wood to support the most fruit bearing wood possible.

I treat every scaffold like a central leader, removing wood more than half the diameter as the “trunk” of the scaffold and then treat secondary branches the same way. This is a primary tool for determining what wood to remove when opening up a tree even distribution of light.

[markalbob]

Alan, hoping for a variety of inputs but I admit you were one of the guys I was most hoping to hear from since you seem to have a pretty solid knowledge base in modifying apple trees to bring them into fruiting, etc:

So if I wanted say 9 or a dozen varieties (just looking for a nice, even number for multiplying): Grow out the 3 thickest scaffolds out this year, (trimming the others away while dormant?), and next year graft or train each for 3 (or 4) nice secondary branches to graft to, higher up the main 3? Thoughts on how high for that second round of “splitting”?

Thank you!

[alan]

For that purpose, I believe you’d be better served with a central leader tree so you could use entire scaffolds for each variety and still have room for about 9 different types on a tree with a low first tier.

I think it might be a bit of a nightmare trying to manage so many different varieties in an open-center tree. I fear that if you have the scaffolds split into two equal sized branches there would be inadequate strength to avoid having them split under cropload, unless you devise mechanical means to stop that from happening. It could be done with some ingenuity but if your are smart enough to solve that problem you might come to realize that you don’t need that many russets on a single tree

St. Edmonds is distinctive because of its earliness, but for me I think Golden Russet, Ashmead’s and Hooples are all the russets I need… maybe Roxbury. Everyone has an opinion, though. Yours is the only one that counts.

[markalbob]

You are probably right about the number of russet a person needs versus the 11 year old in me playing Apple Pokémon and trying to catch them all.

So the open center is potentially weaker especially if your grafting multiple things onto it? I guess that would be good information for me moving forward

[alan]

No, an open center is every bit as strong, it is co-dominant leaders that tend to split, whether we are talking about the main trunk or the scaffolds individually. Branches are held onto wood by membrane of the larger branch they are attached to. If two branches begin at the same place and grow at near equal rates there is no dominant branch that can wrap tissue around the less dominant one to secure it. The two competing branches often create a tissue inversion where they meet and split there when holding crop or under wind pressure.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it takes me too much time to go out and photograph and post every time I want to describe something. I have sugar maples all around my property with codominant leaders and I often see such trees split under stress.

Here is a vaguely pornographic photo example. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/isapruning-101229082217-phpapp02/95/isa-pruning-34-728.jpg?cb=1293611041

[markalbob]

In the words of Paris Hilton, thats hot.zz

[markalbob]

I didn’t expect to learn this much about crotches today, but if you were to look at these do they look secure for building off of? Same boskoop, 2 angles

o

[alan]

I’d remove them right now. Anything more than a half the diameter of the trunk at point of attachment tends to be automatic for me… except in certain cases where I have three such branches well positioned to make an open center peach or nectarine. It still comes with some risk if there is inverted bark.

[markalbob]

So am I correct in sort of summarizing that if you were going to do a multi graft, you would sort of keep the basic idea of a central leader and all side branches needing to be significantly thinner, and you were just graft out a few inches on the smaller branches? So in the end you will probably also have a tree that is at least 60% whatever the parent was I assume, a branch or two each of different things but most of the wood actually being whatever the parent tree was?

Sorry, I feel like I’m picking your brain hard today but I also did not realize that that boskoop was in such bad shape

[roth2000]

Mark have you watched Skillcult’s videos on modified central leader training? It may not be exactly what your looking for but the idea of how a tree uses it resources is pretty sound and helped me alot in the way i approach grafting and pruning.

[alan]

An open center tree can have as many as 4 branches so each of those could easily be a different variety. I change over scaffolds by grafting to a water sprout growing off of it as close to the trunk as possible and then use the original scaffolds as anchors to string tie the grafts to more parallel position after a couple of years. As the graft gains dominance I gradually remove the original scaffold, finally cutting it off at the point of the graft when I know longer need a place to tie string to train my new scaffold.

If you want to put more than 4 varieties on one tree, I think a central leader is a better way to go, but you certainly could have as many secondary branches grafted to other varieties as you want, but it would become confusing, I think.

One of the smartest ideas I ever came up with was to graft new varieties as extensions of the trunk. Start with a vigorous variety and then change it to a less vigorous one in the middle of the tree to be then next 3-4’ of trunk and 2nd tier, and then an even less vigorous one to be the third tier of branches on top of that. That would be a nice tree to use as a frankentree, but you’d have to choose same vigor varieties for each tier, if you know what I mean. That would take a lot of good information to begin with.

[Rosdonald]

I read this topic with great interest. It is similar to what I have been attempting for several years. I have neither the experience nor the discipline that @alan has, and cannot begin to attempt to guide you in those matters. I thought I could comment on lessons learned from my own experience.

Almost all of my Frankentrees are on MM111. They have been very slow to bear. My dear friend @PomGranny has pointed out, and rightly so, that I am pruning the crap out of them to their detriment. I confess to the same. The grafts have borne when the tree has not, but that’s ok with me. MM111 offers a tremendous number of grafting spots. Mine are generally modified central leader. Without that modification they have reached 15 feet+, and this is not a workable height for me. You can see by my photos that my grafts are primarily on the lowest part of the tree, with the base variety higher where I prefer not to work.

I have designated some of my trees as primary recipients of limbertwigs, russets, and red fleshed. As has been pointed out, you are not going to get all of any of these apples on one tree. I have managed to get about 12 limbertwig varieties on my old fashioned LT so far, and I’m still adding.

I started grafting 5 or 6 years into the trees life, and I hesitated to cut a scaffold or sometimes even laterals back to their origin and shorten one side of the tree significantly over the other. Basically I threw a bunch of grafts on it to see what would stick, often pretty far out from the trunk. As a result I ended up with a bunch of random grafts at the end of branches. I have now started to remove grafts favoring one variety over another. On those I wanted to maintain, I have put multiple grafts of the same variety all along the branch.

Old Fashioned LT

Here’s a bunch of Eves Delight grafts all along the same scaffold. I could have saved myself a lot of headache by grafting one to a shortened branch which would have grown out to make the same.

Same goes for my pink delight scaffold.

I picked a backup tree for russets. My main tree is Jonathan. Or as my grandson Nathan read to me this weekend " Jo- Nathan."

Russets

My back up is Liberty.

My main red fleshed tree is Wolf River. It has an open center due to fireblight and aggressive pruning 4 or 5 years ago. The disadvantage I see is that while the length of the scaffolds and thus the number of laterals can change, there will be no new higher scaffolds to graft on. What you see is what you get.

Red fleshed grafts

I admire your planning process early in the game, and wish you the best of success! To those who can’t fathom why on earth a person would want to put new varieties on a tree (my daughter Jennifer) they don’t know what they are missing!

BTW, the different colors of tape I use in labeling mean absolutely nothing–whatever is on hand. All the colors are a bit overwhelming, perhaps even comical. That just adds to the fun. People drive by and wonder what the hell is going on in the orchard. Actually I wonder that myself much of the time.

[Stevelp]

Hudson’s Golden Gem is a terrific Russett and everyone who tries it loves it. Large, often conical, full russett, pear-like growing habit, and pear-like flavor somewhat. Somewhat resistant to plum curculio maybe because of the skin but not immune. Less damage than my non russets.

[IL847]

Regina, the picture looks like the United Nations of the trees😂

[Rosdonald]

I’m an equal opportunity grafter.

[blueKYstream]

How do you keep track of all the grafts long term? I label a map online, but that wouldn’t work with trees with that many grafts. I tried using flagging tape before, but I’ve only gotten about a couple months tops.

[NJpete]

@Rosdonald
I also am shooting for ~ 14 foot trees to help keep them manageable with small, mobile and not very high ladder. I did not plant any mm111 rooted trees for fear that I would just be fighting their nature (and quite frankly also some expected pruning laziness on my part). I went with genevas, M7 and mm111/b9 interstem. That said I would love to hear about your experiences with the path not taken. I kind of wish I had planted one on mm111 just to see how it went.

[wdingus]

How old are your M111/B9 interstem trees? I have a few of the same as well as M111/G41. Some are starting on their 4th season and thanks to intense deer pressure, none are more than perhaps 7’ so far. I’m hoping these will stay a manageable size without intensive pruning, and of course be self supporting.

Thanks.

[Rosdonald]

My drawings and labels are cumulative. This is the last year I can get away with such detailed information. Some drawings are more manageable, while others are complex to the extreme.
Johnson’s keeper not too bad

Wolf River too too much

Jonathan