Good point, summer pruning doesn’t give you the big wood that winter pruning does. Almost all my pruning is summer. Even if I want renewal wood I usually prune for that after harvest not in winter.
FN, I manage many orchards by doing most of my pruning in summer, including my own. Of course if one removes vegetative shoots in mid summer there will not be a return of vigorous shoots- even where it actually rains during the growing season, but I always leave some good wood on my desireable varieties to the benefit of folks who get scion wood from me and for my own use in my nursery and the orchards I manage.
My customers are extremely grateful when I turn a producer of mediocre fruit into something really special.
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Hey Alan,
I was thinking about your choice of words for this topic and thought they might make a good song title.Someone should pen some lyrics.It might be popular among fruit growing circles.
Also,if I had some King David,pencil size wood,I’d send them,but there are no Apple trees with that name at my sister’s orchard. Brady
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I only winter prune, and that’s when I collect scion wood. But some
varieties just don’t produce thick wood. Pluots are a good example.
My container trees produce almost no wood after they start bearing. I had to buy another Flavor Supreme because i couldn’t even find enough new budwood to graft.
We had fireblight in my county really bad last year. King David is one of the few that was affected. I use skinny scions a lot. I just use what I’ve got and it usually works.
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Thats interesting to hear we both had King David as a bad standout on fireblight. It is supposed to be resistant but doubt is being cast on that. My problems were late in the summer; late fireblight is very different than early fireblight and early is usually the main problem time.
I did more than 100 grafts last year and the most common failures were skinny nectarine and peach scions. I prefer thick, and since it seems I had fairly equal success on TYPE of graft, with the splices looking a lot neater after a year’s growth, and being easier, I’m going to do mostly splices this year. I’ll post some of my successful whip and tongue grafts from last year (on another thread) so that newbies won’t feel bad; they are the ugliest successful grafts I’ve ever seen, even in photos online 
the punk version of Skinny Scion Blues: Skinny Scions Suck!!!
@scottfsmith Did your King David survive its fire blight this past summer? I may graft my young KD over to something else like Hooples or Boskoop. Am not in the mood to fool with known blight magnets. I talked to a man who tried to get two southeast U.S. heirloom sellers to change their catalog descriptions of King David to show blight susceptibility but they refused.
Hambone, it had a ton of small shoot strikes but I think I pruned it all out and there is still plenty of good wood left. I went over it carefully.
Good to hear a pro has a similar opinion on its blight susceptibility.
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Scott- when you prune out blight do you prune back into two year old wood? I recently read an article recommending pruning into two year old wood and leaving a stub to be removed in dormant season.
Hi,
Have you been able to taste Jam Session yet? I have Blues Jam, hasn’t fruited yet, but I’m wondering if these are both tart plums. I’m looking for a tart plum but non-astringent.