So, last year I had 2 peach trees that needed pruned, and for two purposes I was wanting to prune one how I thought was correct, and leave the other one to prune following year, one to show differences in a year and then also to greedily get some peaches from the buds that were still on the second one.(I did not get any peaches, the squirrels did)
Note- I know i should have pruned these even lower for a ‘small’ orchard but I was trying to both get fruit and keep a person high canopy to walk under.
Two learnings,
One, not really worth early years fruit, there’s not much of it and too many ways you could just not get it anyway.(exception being figs maybe)
Second - when they are at this age, they grow a LOT in one year, these are semi-dwarf and now I’m left with a question of - is it even worth pruning the one I skipped last year because it’s such a large cut.
Last year pics and where I wanted to cut it(and ended up cutting on the second one.
First tree- unpruned one, but I wanted to cut where green line is and added notches around blue(notches worked out great)
How it looks now, just under 1 year later, im left wondering should i even prune it at green where i wanted to now or leave it as modified central leader?
Second tree, the one I think I pruned well - just under one year ago.
Here it is just under a year later. Even this one has some that I should have pruned in later summer because they just grew so vigorously
Is this helpful, for me it is. Knowing both the consequences of one year and the benefits of just pruning it earlier(or even earlier than I did to be honest) are.
If anyone has thoughts on pruning the unpruned one - would love to hear it.