First year growing plums for me. A couple questions. Does training limbs to a more horizonal position bring them into fruit production sooner? Do people even prune plums? Can plums be headed back to control height at a chosen level?
Depends on what you want to do. Many people prune plums as they would peaches. Open center/ open vase shape is common.
I try to prune mine to open center. They are a pain in my ars! Constantly growing straight up and I constantly pruning and pulling them down. I just keep telling myself…someday! haha
Not sure on the bring to fruit early, not to up to date on my science. lol
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I raised the “horizontal vs. vertical” question a few weeks ago -here’s the link:
I started pruning my plum to an central leader, but ended up pulling the leader to a 45 degree angle and opening the center that way. On another plum, since gone, I somewhat inadvertently ended up a with an interesting corkscrew thing- it looked pretty neat and was very productive.
I think you have a lot of leeway, and young plums are very vigorous growers; they’ll give you a lot of chances when you are uncertain. You need light and air to as much of the tree as possible and it doesn’t have to fit a certain mold exactly.
Good luck,
M
I am well versed for pruning and training apples and pears, just wasnt sure how plums respond to the same techniques. Havent tried growing plums until this season. Thanks for the input everyone.
Stone fruit generally set flower buds and fruit on upright shoots just as well as on more horizontal shoots.
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I assume air flow and sunlight within the canopy are as important as with apples and pears?
That is, the stone fruit you grow in Texas. If you grew Euro plums you might be singing a different tune, as some old timers say. They take longer to fruit than most J. plums- Elephant Heart being a Jap exception, and I believe they fruit much sooner if you spread branches. Sometimes I do something called festooning them which is pulling them well below horizontal to coax flower production. It is an old English technique and my own experience with it suggests that it works.
Yes, but maybe not for exactly the same reasons. An open canopy also reduces brown rot pressure with them.
How I train plums depends partially on the growth habit of the variety but all roads seem to eventually lead to an open center.
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