Thank you more mentioning Skillcraft’s videos. I did not know he had a video on notching.
I will try and find it to watch.
The things we learn along the way. I’ve done some things and realized I probably should not have done those things.
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Here are a couple for ya!
Good stuff for sure.
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I went through a similar learning curve with the trees that I’m growing in a Belgian fence. From what I had gathered reading up on espalier, you’re supposed to cut back the scaffolds pretty significantly from season to season, both to encourage laterals and to impart greater sturdiness to the scaffold.
Like you, however, I found that the heading back didn’t really yield the results I was looking for. In some trees, for example, it seemed to generate a little bush of twiggy growth right below the heading cut, with nothing that offered itself as a leading candidate to continue the scaffold and very little branching out down below. (My Orleans Reinette was particularly bad for this.)
Notching has proved to be a much more dependable way of training the trees to do what I’d like them to do.
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Thank you for posting these!! I will watch them a few times to get my skills ready to try this. I think this will help with my trees. I have read this a few places before and seeing a video helps me more than just reading an article.
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You are welcome Mike! I sure appreciate SkillCult making the videos and having them available for us all to see. He is very good at showing step by step what needs to be done and his explanations are great. It really resonated with me watching this last time. Sometimes I need to hear, read, or see something multiple times before I can really process and remember it. He is a great teacher, as are so many of the Forum members! What a blessing to have this resource!
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I agree with you. It helps me to actually see some techniques being done in order for me to feel confident in doing them. I can read things but sometimes the author does not do a very good job of explaining it, IMO. Once I see it done it clicks better for me to do and remember when I do that again.
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Exactly! Sometimes different authors using slightly different terminology too… this can cause confusion. A picture is worth a thousand words…
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You can bend branches by attaching a weight to the shoot —-works good for 1-2 year old shoots.
Only need to get about 20-30 degrees from vertical.
Don’t go past 50 degrees.
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That’s cool thanks for sharing that photo.
There is a limb bender on a new peach tree start a few years back.
Clothes pin… holding that limb down some.
It has turned into a nice cordon now…
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I’ve had very good luck convincing small/young “scaffold” branches on apple trees to grow at a new angle… With clothes pins just like that. Just don’t wait until they’re too big though!
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This is perfect. Thank you for the clear-language summaries of the techniques, what they are for, and when to do them.
I’ve been slogging my way through Lespinasse & Leterme’s Growing Fruit and Harris’ Arboriculture, and with a bit more understanding through Otto’s The Backyard Orchardist. Your summary gives the big-picture context for their details.
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It’s certainly possible to crack large limbs when trying to shove big stretchers in. Just saying …
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I’m bookmarking this!
@Boizeau thanks for saying 1-2 year, I’ve been unsure when to try branch training. I’m about to plant a 5’ apple tree and am planning to bend the branches to horizontal shortly after.
Lots of ways to do it just pick what works best for you. I personally use bailing twine as well as pruned sticks to either tie down or wedge out branches at the angles I’m looking for
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Two years ago my young Jiro persimmon was having a rough time with the March-April wind gusts and I cross-tied it. But there was also a southward branch growing stubbornly upward instead of outward for scaffolding, so I put in a 5th stake and constrained it to a wider angle.
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Intrepid,
Love your ornamented tree 
As a hobby machinist, I’d love to have a tree which grew nuts and bolts like yours 
I agree there are a bunch of ways to train a tree. One issue you may run into with weights is that sometimes it’s hard to get enough weight to bend the branch, then when the weight is enough, a strong branch comes through and blows the weights hard enough to break the branch.
We don’t have time to bend branches anymore. But when we had time to bend branches, staking worked best for us.
We didn’t use anything fancy to stake trees down. Mostly used old clothes hangers. We’d straighten the hangers out, cut them in half, push them into wet ground as far as we could, bend a hook at the other end, and tie a branch down to the hook.
Occasionally the wind would pull a hanger out of the ground, but most of the time not.
Bending branches does speed fruiting, but as I mentioned, we don’t have time to do it anymore, so we simply prune off any branches not growing the right way.
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Thank you! I really appreciate this advice!
My husband calls it the really messed-up Christmas tree.