After looking at your additional pics, I’d go with A1, A3, A4 as scaffolds and prune off all the rest. On the second tree, you could go with B1, B2, B3 and be fine. In a commercial orchard, B2 would be too low to start a scaffold because the orchardist couldn’t get equipment underneath, but for a home grower, that’s not a concern.
We have both a commercial orchard and a home orchard (where we don’t have to get any equip under the trees, other than a short robot mower) and I’ve started scaffolds at ground level at the home orchard.
All that said, don’t fuss over scaffold selection too much. A peach tree can easily be made productive even if the scaffolds aren’t perfectly placed. When I choose scaffolds, I try to choose 3 evenly around the tree (so that they divide the tree into thirds) keep them high enough to get equip underneath, keep ones on the smallish side relative to the trunk, keep ones which have at least a couple inches vertical space between each other, and keep ones forming a collar at the base of the scaffold.
Those are the ideal conditions, but it rarely works out anything close to perfectly. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on each young tree, so the decisions of which scaffolds to keep are made pretty quickly (like 10 seconds).
Thanks for taking the time to weigh-in again, with the updated pics. Our wet season is March-May, with last frost mid-May. Sounds like I should wait for the tree to come out of dormancy, then look for a dry spell (5 days?) to cut the larger scaffolds off?
With some of those scaffold sizes unbalanced, do I need to do anything special to manage that?
Also, about what distance from center do you usually aim for the scaffold to hit secondary scaffold branching for a tree kept 10-11’ across. I’m not clear on when to head a scaffold, and if it’s more desired to have it branch to two secondary, or just a single side shoot.
A lot of literature says to wait for a dry spell. That would be optimum, but there are few dry spells here in the spring. We don’t pay attention to precip when pruning. If pruning during the early part of the growing season, I’ve found the trees will callus without canker without too much problem.
Also for folks who have reasonably cold winters like here in the KC area, pruning trees hard before or during winter can kill a young tree. For that reason alone, we try not to prune trees just before or during winter, or if we have to, we try not to prune young trees too hard.
We don’t worry too much about that. The trees will mostly even themselves out eventually. The largest scaffold will always be the largest, but the trees fill in regardless. One issue can occur where two lower scaffolds selected at exactly the same height on the tree will starve all the nutrients from the third scaffold higher up. That scaffold can sometime lack vigor to the point it does affect it’s performance substantially. That’s why I like to keep at least a 2" vertical spacing (I prefer more) between scaffolds.
Our trees are substantially larger 18’ diameter. I’d keep a minimum of the first 2’ of scaffold clean. Then you can allow some shoots to grow. If you want to try to get a little bit of fruit earlier, you could just leave shoots the first 2’ of scaffolds, then prune them off later, as the tree gets larger. We eventually prune everything off for about the first 3 feet of the scaffold, when the trees are mature.
You might think that all the trees would have a 6’ diameter donut hole in the middle, but that’s not true. The canopy works it’s way back in to fill the middle.
One thing to watch about forks on a scaffold is that you want all the secondary branching to have good collars, so they don’t break off. In other words, try to select secondary branches with the same good crotches as the scaffolds do. Look for collars forming, if possible. Shoots which come off secondary branches really don’t matter. They generally don’t get big enough to cause a problem and break off. Even if they do, it’s not a major branch, so no big deal.
Make sure you don’t over think it. There is pretty much no such thing as a perfectly pruned peach tree. I have a guy who has worked for me for four years. He prunes as good as me. Yet he and I never prune a peach tree exactly the same way.
If you leave something, you can always prune it off later, so you can delay a decision somewhat. Just make sure you don’t leave too much. That’s one of the biggest mistakes new home growers make. They are afraid to prune their peach tree. But these young trees can be whacked mercilessly during the growing season.
You’ll want to cut the scaffolds back to where they are growing more horizontal (vs. almost straight vertical). Or cut them back to a secondary which is growing more horizontal.
Here is an old thread where I showed pruning before and after pics. The tree in the pics is a Contender which wants to grow more upright. Peach trees must be forced to grow more lateral, if you want to be able to prune, thin and pick fruit from the ground.
If you go down to the end of the thread, I have a pic I took last spring of the same tree, so you can see a sort of evolution of a 4 year old peach tree.
Also, young branches can usually be bent quite a bit and staked to achieve a perfect pie divided by three, even when the three branches are naturally positioned to give half the pie to one side and quarters to the other. .
You’re speaking to something I’ve been wondering for years now. In general, can you have a main scaffold that breaks one direction shortly after leaving the trunk and is therefore under a twisting load? I had wondered about that and convinced myself that would lead to issues under snow or fruit loading, but it sounds like that is an alright thing to do?
I wasn’t sure where that came from, until I read the other thread you linked. Then I thought some toilet paper in your last pic would have been nice for scale on height Perhaps it will be the new standard for posting pics here…
And, I loved seeing that progression of pictures, as it gave me something tangible to go on. Wish we could see more of those progressions, or even just the ‘targets’.
Most Peach trees in NC are still pruned open center with short, wide trees where the thinning and picking is done from the ground.
I have seen other pruning methods in other states where the trees are planted closer together and pruned to much taller scaffolds where much of the fruit must be picked from a ladder
Check out the picture in figure 2 from publication from PSU
Thanks for sharing. It’s surprisingly difficult to find good pictures of trees that one should be aiming for with their backyard pruning. That one shows the structure very nicely. Looks like they fork after about 2-4’ out from the trunk.
Perhaps it will be the new standard for posting pics here…
