Santa Rosa Plum Training/Pruning Help

General Fruit Growing
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I have questions regarding the central leader and grafting onto scaffold branches.

  1. I trained my Santa Rosa plum as a modified central leader. The central leader is 15 degrees from vertical at the base then goes 20 degrees from vertical at the top in a different direction. Any suggestions or concerns how I can fix this? Does it need to be fixed?

  2. I was planning on cleft grafting superior and toka plum onto the santa rosa plum. Toka is suppose to be more vigorous so I was planning to put that on the lower scaffolds. Superior plum is suppose to be more weeping in nature so I was planning to put that on the higher scaffolds. My question is how far from the trunk on the scaffolds should the grafts be placed?

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I don’t know distance, but wanted to mention if Toka is more vigorous plant on the north side, that will slow it down. Thanks for that info, I plan to graft both of those too.

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@njgrower – feel free to experiment with central leader training for your Santa Rosa, so don’t let me discourage you. The dogma is that you should should train Japanese plums as an open vase – and the reasons are good. I have attempted a modified central leader on a Santa Rosa and the results were not great. I had to ‘remodify’ the leader all summer long. Eventually the leader grew from 7 to 17 feet in one season, meanwhile the scaffolds hardly grew out at all. All growth was spindly and long. The open vase shape does a better job of sharing the vigor among multiple leaders. When you summer prune you can sort of indiscriminately pull back all the vigor and tame the tree. The small modifications you’re making on the central leader aren’t enough to calm the tree. Calming the tree down is important to encourage spurring wood.

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Thank you for your response. Do you recommend me cutting off another 2-3 feet from the central leader?

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Stephen,
I’ve had 2 Superior and one Toka for 3 seasons now, in my experience even tho Superior does have a bit of a “weepy” growth habit it is EXTREMELY vigorous, much more so than Toka. Some of its branches will easily grow 4-6 feet in a season! Here’s a pic of the 2 next to each other, planted the same year, Toka on the left. Note the difference in girth of the trunks already as well. I’d also like to point out that I just got done pruning both trees, barely touched the Toka, took tons of wood off Superior (yet its still has 3 times as much wood left as Toka)

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This is what I would do if this were my Santa Rosa — feel free to disagree. Maintain the inverted tripod shape with the top 3 branches and cut off the lowest branch, then brace the tree with a stake to return the trunk to vertical. Then you have an open-center vase tree.

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My santa rosa plum now has a trunk that is 5.5 feet tall. There are three scaffold branches. I notched above a vegetative bud to try to get a fourth scaffold branch. I plan on cleft grafting superior plum on the lowest branch and toka plum on the middle branch. I was planning on grafting 6-12 inches from the trunk. Thanks for your help!

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Looks good to me… You’ve got good vertical separation from the scaffold attachment points. I would shorten up the scaffolds (if keeping as a Santa Rosa) if there are any decent outward buds, but you’ll probably take care of that when you graft on your scions.

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The highest branch I’m going to leave as a Santa Rosa. I was going to cut it back further, but considering I am grafting the other branches I feel like I need a nurse branch. I don’t know how long the nurse branch needs to be.

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I do it this way — if you’re leave a nurse branch I don’t winter prune it (which invigorates), but do summer prune, to keep it tame. You don’t want it sapping vigor from the grafts, just keeping the tree on life support.

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I pulled down the top branch some. Was wondering if I should pull it down more. The branch is just out of arm reach. I don’t want to go horizontal with the branch. Any input would be great!

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Nope, that angle looks good to me – 45-60 degrees from vertical is your target. I think you’re all set! For reference in other situations where you’ve got wood that won’t bend where you want, there’s a technique (borrowed from carpentry) called kerfing, which involves making a series of spaced cuts in the branch which will let you more easily bend a recalcitrant branch. Check out this 90 degree bend on a straight piece of wood:

(wow!)

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