Nectarine pruning question

[TheNiceGuy]

I have a Fantasia nectarine tree that’s gotten very large. So far I’ve been pruning it standard vase shape and thinning and it’s working out well. However, it’s starting to get too tall. If I chop the tops off though, this is where most of the fruiting wood is? I also don’t want to cut back to the main branches, as I did this with a peach tree and it never recovered.

[z0r]

can you cut back to somewhere that still has 1-year wood and leave a 3-6 inch 1-year stub? those would then be good regrowth points

[TheNiceGuy]

Can you show me a picture? I’m having a hard time accurately knowing what you mean.

[fruitkismet]

If you have 3-4 main stems, you could cut one back every year and lower the height gradually while still getting fruit continuously.

[TheNiceGuy]

Wouldn’t that kill off the main trunk you cut back?

I ended up cutting about 2/3 the tree away. Some of the branches were four or 5 inches thick. So far it’s been a good tree and responded well to heavy pruning, so I’m hoping for the best. At least most of the tree is reachable without a ladder now.

[z0r]

yeah all I meant was, in response to your having killed a tree by cutting back too far, leaving new stubs is a defense against that. peaches are pretty bad at epicormic-type growth. so you can cut back to the highest point you still have newish wood. your picture looks good

[Olpea]

I agree with z0r. Leaving stub cuts from year old wood will help renew the tree. That’s about all you can do at this point.

Of course it’s too late now, but I’ll mention it’s always better to train the tree earlier if you have time. That way you don’t have to resort to extremely aggressive pruning.
We prune very aggressively multiple times every year to avoid peach/nectarine trees getting too far ahead of us (too tall or too thick).

Older trees calm down a bit, as do trees with a heavy crop load, so they don’t have to be pruned quite as hard. But you still have to be careful not to let them get too tall.

When giving peach tree pruning advice, I always try to emphasize vigorous peach trees must be pruned brutally (in terms of year old wood). Once year old wood, which has grown too tall, is allowed to become two year old (because it wasn’t pruned as one year old wood) then it starts to become more and more difficult to shape the tree because now you have to cut into two year old wood.

Trying to prune two year old wood gives you the problem that it doesn’t have viable leaf buds, so you have to prune the two year old wood back to a point where there is a branch which contains some one year old wood somewhere on it. Three year old wood is even worse.

The point is that you want to try to avoid having to prune two year old wood if possible, by aggressively pruning one year old wood which is too tall. Hope that makes sense?

Here are some of our pruning pics I posted on old threads.

Here is a before and after pic on a very vigorous young peach tree. Notice how tall the wood got in one season, and how I ruthlessly hacked it back, without getting into much two year old wood. At this point in peach tree’s life, we don’t care about getting peaches off the tree. All we care about is shaping the future of a tree. Sort of like how one raises children. Think of your tree as your young child. No parent expects anything productive from their young child, all they are thinking about is shaping them so that their child has a productive and meaningful life in the future.

Need info on basic early care for 3' tall White Lady Peach Tree in NJ

For anyone interested in how we prune, I was out in the backyard and pruned a couple trees. Here’s a before and after pic of the tree pictured above. I let it get too tall this summer, so had to take quite a bit off. It probably would have had about 100 flower buds on it. I cut just about all them off. Now it only has enough wood to raise about 8 peaches. It’s a sacrifice made to build a good tree. Here’s another before pic: [KIMG2085] Here is the after: [KIMG2089] The tree will put…

Here is an older tree I pruned aggressively after a season of heavy growth. Imagine if I had skipped a year of aggressive pruning. The tree would be unmanageable and require even more severe pruning to try to bring it back down. That’s the point to remember. If your peach/nect tree is a vigorous grower, you can’t even miss one season of pruning, otherwise it multiplies your problem. Generally with vigorous peach/nect trees you will have to aggressively prune at least twice a year. Again, if you miss a year of aggressive pruning, you’re sort of sunk and back in the boat of trying to get the tree down by cutting into old wood. Renewal pruning can be done, but as you can attest it is much more difficult than simply keeping the tree from getting too tall. If the peach tree is vigorous, it’s almost impossible to overprune year old wood on a peach tree.

Thinning vs poor fruit set

This is obviously an old thread, but since I was pruning today I thought I’d show something perhaps interesting. In post 17 above I showed a pic of a tree I had severely pruned this spring (not the second pic in post 38, but the first pic, post 17). I had quite a few trees like the one in 17, trees which hardly had any fruit, and were pruned to remove any shoots which were blank. I’ve been doing fall pruning for a couple weeks now and noticed a lot of the trees are unrecognizable from the but…

Here is a video I posted on the forum of me pruning a peach tree. Note that the tree was pruned extensively during the season prior. In other words, the tree was already pruned in the growing season and the fall prior to the spring pruning.

Heavy pruning Peach

If interested, here is a video of some spring pruning I did last March. I’ve intended to post it on the forum before, but never got around to it. It’s not as good as the videos from NCSU (Mike Parker) but perhaps you can glean something from it. I made it for customers whom I sold trees to. [peach pruning video]

Here is another couple pics regarding pruning.

Pruning Peach trees to have an open center

Lot’s of good comments here. I used to prune “when the knife was sharp”. We still do some, for labor cosidrrations. But it’s best to prune peaches in warmer weather during the growing season. Here’s a peach tree we pruned a few days ago. [04] Here’s one we pruned back to nothing a month ago. [21] We go through and rip out those upright shoots about this time. We don’t head them, we rip them out. The caveat is that if it’s varieties which tend to produce a lot of blind wood, like Earlys…

[KSprairie]

@Olpea

Trying to prune two year old wood gives you the problem that it doesn’t have viable leaf buds, so you have to prune the two year old wood back to a point where there is a branch which contains some one year old wood somewhere on it. Three year old wood is even worse.

I know this is an old thread from last year, and the original topic was pruning Nectarines. @Olpea mentioned pruning 2& 3 yr old wood which is exactly what I need help with.

A friend asked to look at her fruit trees and give her some advice. I didn’t take pictures when I went to look at them unfortunately. They all need pruning but the peaches are going to be the hardest.

They are 12’-15’ tall. There is a lot of 2 & 3 year old wood. The trees were planted last year, but we’re bought as mature trees. I’d guess their age at around 5 years. I was planning on pruning them this week. But some good sized limbs are going to have to come off to get them under control height-wise. And it will be difficult to find 1 year wood to prune back to, although there is some along the main scaffolds in several places.

So I guess I have a few questions;
From advice I have read here, I do practice fall pruning when necessary. But I haven’t pruned 3 year old wood in the fall before. Is that a bad idea? If it’s ok to prune older wood in the fall, Is it ok to take it all off at once? Meaning I don’t leave any big scaffolds to prune back in the spring?

If there’s no 1-year wood to prune back to on the 3yr old limbs, will it be ok to prune back to 2yr wood that has some 1yr shoots on it?

Any advice as to how to proceed? I’ve done a lot of searching but can’t find info on pruning older wood on peaches that haven’t been pruned for several years.

[Olpea]

@KSprairie

From advice I have read here, I do practice fall pruning when necessary. But I haven’t pruned 3 year old wood in the fall before. Is that a bad idea?

Hi KSprairie,

What you are referring to is called dehorning a peach tree. I’ve found if you prune that hard this close to winter, you run the risk of killing the tree if the winter is somewhat tough.

A month and a half ago I would have said have at it. But, if it were my trees I would wait till spring (they are done growing this season anyway). Specifically I would wait till the trees are fully leafed out, then hammer away.

@KSprairie

If there’s no 1-year wood to prune back to on the 3yr old limbs, will it be ok to prune back to 2yr wood that has some 1yr shoots on it?

As long as you prune back to a place which has some green foliage somewhere on the limb (assuming we are talking pruning in the growing season) then the branch you’ve pruned won’t die. The leaves will keep it alive, unless it’s something ridiculous extreme like pruning a 4" scaffold back to a weak shoot 4" shoot which has a few leaves on it, and that’s the only thing feeding the scaffold.

In that case the scaffold may die, or fail to heal such a large wound. But in reasonable cases, any foliage will feed the limb during the growing season and the limb will add a lot more foliage if the pruning is done early in the growing season, but not in the dormant season.

This advice is for KS/MO in the central to northern parts of the states… Very different climates will yield very different results.

[KSprairie]

Thanks so much for replying Mark.
I couldn’t find much of anything about pruning older wood in peaches, much less pruning them in late fall. I had reservations about pruning older wood this time of year. I’m glad I asked and that you had time to reply!
We will wait until spring and prune when these trees are fully leafed out. Hopefully we can rejuvenate them and bring them down to a manageable height. I’ve never seen peach trees this tall before. There is a ton of blind wood of course. This is a good visual as to why it’s imperative we prune peaches at least once, if not twice, each year.