I am going to jump in here and add a comment or two. I wouldn’t remove 1/2 the bio mass of a tree at this time of the year. That’s a whole lot the tree’s photosynthesize factory suddenly gone when its trying to put energy into root and trunk growth as well as shoot development.
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On fruiting trees lots of summer growth will shade out the interior fruiting wood. First they will stop initiating flower buds with some shade. More shade will cause death of those limbs and soon you will end up with all fruit on the outside of the tree as your fruiting wood is all gone back towards the center.
Early summer pruning can also allow more light to get into the shaded peaches and get some more red coloring into the fruit if done like 3 weeks ahead of harvest. Also makes it easy to get your spray in there especially if you are needing brown rot control.
Most well cared for trees will make too much growth over the summer especially if its a light crop so summer pruning is a good thing on peaches of any age.
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Hi KSprairie,
For mature trees, we generally don’t head back shoots if they are growing laterally, unless they are shading something underneath, or on the outside and running into the aisle ways, or running into the tree next to it. Even then we generally don’t head them back, but just completely remove them.
If we are trying to train a young tree, we do head back long laterals to stiffen the shoot.
Here I’m going to disagree with Jerry a bit. It’s rare that I disagree with another commercial peach grower because commercial growers generally figure all the same things out and come to mostly the same conclusions.
But when training a young peach tree and selecting scaffolds, we routinely remove 1/2 the biomass, or more. Even this time of year. It does shock the trees a bit, but they will have over 2 months of vigorous growing to recover. By the time terminal buds are set, the young trees will be choked again with new growth. Much of that new growth will be put into the three scaffolds chosen for the open center shape. The young tree will throw out some “new” scaffolds for sure, but much of the new growth will be put into the scaffolds previously chosen.
We’ve been selecting scaffolds on young trees lately. We still have more to work on. I’ll try to get some pics, if I can manage it.
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@KSprairie I went through this process in the last 30 days for one of my peach tree. I removed 3/4th of the growth in last 3 weeks and cut back on many left over laterals, watered in some fertilizer once a week 1-2 TBS / 2 gallons of water. I see my tree is creating vigorous new laterals on the this year’s growth. I don’t know whether these new growth will have flower buds, but here in Portland, OR we have one more month of “hot” weather and I hoping the tree will get enough foliage to survive for the next year.
Tree before removing close to 3/4th of the growth.
After removing growth
New growth on the previously shaded out wood.
New growth on laterals that I cutback.
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I just removed all the middle section of my donut peach after I harvested all the fruit, I now pinch new growth in that section. This year I had almost 30 peaches for my small urban/suburban yard.
Edit to add a picture of my donut peach after summer pruning or whatever you call it.
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All that growing and cutting to me is more of a symptom of too much vigor than anything else. Think if all that growth went into fruit instead of kindling. A semi dwarfing rootstock is in order but not readily available. Less water would help. Less fertilizer would help.
No answers just observations. But I am withholding water on first year nectarines in my greenhouse to slow them down. They are planted 3x7ft and a few are nearly that size. They are covered in fruit buds so will fruit next year. They’ve been summer pruned several times. I’ll be pruning lightly at every opportunity from here on out.
A picture of one of my first year nectarines:
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Wow! I thought my plantings in a hedge row was tight with 3ft separation between trees, yours look extreme. What is that training method you are applying? How many fruits do you get per tree?
Regarding your growing and removing comment. You are right, I wish I had known these trees need to be trained. The peach tree in my comment was planted in the ground last year, it was in a pot and our landscaping maintenance company planted by just dropping the potted mass in a big hole.
In my experience growing vegetables in home garden growth/vigor = high yields. I don’t prune or remove tips for tomatoes, peppers and get abundant harvest. They just grow like a mini jungle. Exception is Okra which seem to produce more if I remove the adjacent leaf when I harvest the pod. I don’t have experience growing Fruit trees so they could be different.
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I’ve grown the trees tighter. My last planting on K1, a dwarfing rootstock, were planted 5 x 1.5 ft. Those ended up being thinned to 5x3ft. These will likely be thinned after 4-5 yrs also.
I get all the fruit I want. A nectarine at 7x3ft, maybe 40-50 fruit.
They are pruned to a bush. Nothing open about them. They’ll be cut back after fruit set next year, again after harvest, and as needed about once a month.
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What is your method to generate new fruiting wood.
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New fruiting wood is easy. Any growth does that on peach and nectarine. New fruiting wood while maintaining a small tree is much more difficult. The plan is to take off all wood not needed after fruit set. Keep the amount of fruit I want down low. Cut the rest off after fruit set. That allows new growth that can set fruit buds for next year. Then cut back some shoots after harvest and during the dormant season. Also, summer pruning of tips. Basically, cut back whenever you can while maintaining some fruiting wood.
Stone fruit oversets so much that there is leeway on wood removal. I’ve seen trees in New Zealand cut way back during dormant season. They don’t have freezes so leave a little wood for fruit and cut the rest off. Regrowth fruits the next year.
Sounds easy. It’s not.
PS: Thinking about it some more, I think I need to prune pretty hard this winter. Take off at least half the wood with flower buds. I usually get good set in the greenhouse. So rely on that for fruit and begin the pruning needed to keep the tree small. Further the wood I’ll have is small caliper so can’t support fruit very far out on the branch. Hope for a couple of fruit low down on each branch of what’s there now. Take the rest off this winter. That allows max chance of good fruiting wood next year.
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I am withholding water and the 90 day urea should have about wrapped up, but the skies are not cooperating and growth is excessive on my orchard trees requiring a lot of summer pruning to keep light near fruit.
The problem is that the skies are over-irrigating the trees- sometimes I think I should try root pruning, but I have some crown gall issues here.
With peaches, a vigorous tree will likely be a long lived one. I hate having to get some varieties of pluots on Citation because it’s the only thing available. It makes that species relatively short lived. Not a good feature for trees I sell. Establishing trees are never too vigorous except when I have a surplus of trees ready to sell.
Plus, pruning is my main occupation, although peaches really don’t consume much time.I can do a mature tree in 5 minutes if I’m not being a perfectionist.
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For mature trees, we sometimes get more vigor than we would prefer. This is especially true in light cropping years. The added vigor just increases pruning costs. For that reason, we generally don’t fertilize peach trees from about year three to year nine.
For young trees, we want those to size up as quickly as possible to fill their space, so we fertilize those. We fertilize old trees because they lack vigor and will grow a bunch of short shoots if not fertilized (Some varieties are worse than others.)
Semi-dwarfing rootstocks don’t work in our harsh climate, but I understand they work in more moderate growing climates.
Here are some pics I took today of two young trees when selecting scaffolds. I probably pruned these trees a couple weeks ago. I don’t have any “before” pictures, but I probably pruned off 80% of the biomass. The pics show a side view and a top view of each tree. If you look closely, the pruned trees have new shoot growth of about 2" long since pruning.
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I thought I was the only person who did hack jobs… I’m not alone
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So this tree’s technically in year 4 and it’s finally taking off on me…we’ve covered my weed control…or lack thereof… before. So this is the second year I’ve put lime ony trees (including this one). And this is the first year I’ve used 3 separate doses of N. And this is the first year this set of Cresthavens has taken off on my.
I measured 3 1/2 feet feet of growth and it’s still not done yet.
I’m convinced that lime is the ground improvement that was needed…followed by multiple doses of N.
I in particular am a special child (my issue being stubborness) and the acidity at my orchard makes it a special case…specialness squared…add to that Cresthaven needs a little extra help…and that spells why I’m in year 4 applying fertilizer.
I hope my selfie doesn’t crack any phone or computer screens. I know my phone screen’s already done
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Now that I am trying to grow fruit trees, I am paying attention to trees in general. I found these peach trees on a walk in our neighborhood. It seems like they have been left to grow freely, they are probably over 10-12 ft tall and loaded with fruits. I presume they probably don’t get sprayed due to their height which gives me some relief PLC less of an issue in my neighborhood.
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I watched your peach tree pruning video, no nonsense pruning right there 
Thank you for articulating this so well. I have seen some of this happening in my older peach trees. I let the inner growth get too dense 2 summers in a row. Now there is very little fruiting wood left on the inside. Peach trees sure don’t want to send out new growth in those areas, unfortunately.
Thank you for the 3 weeks before harvest time frame, this is helpful. I completely agree with you on spraying… without some removal of abundant inner growth, it’s hard to even see where any of the peaches are, much less get spray on them.
Thank you, this is what I was trying to recall.
Oh thank goodness. I was a bit worried when I read Jerry’s caution.
I don’t see much way around it if I am going to choose 3 scaffolds and get rid of the rest.
Would it be worthwhile to go through them once they start putting out that new growth and pinch back any growth that is not along the 3 chosen scaffolds? Maybe that growth won’t be very vigorous, as you allude to.
I need to get better at training them so they focus growth in areas I have chosen for them, instead of putting so much growth into limbs that will need to be removed later.
Thank you for the pictures! Glad to see new growth there.
Thanks for posting the pictures. Very helpful. The new growth is encouraging.
Say one of the 3 scaffolds you chose you didn’t really like for some reason- extremely narrow crotch angle or bad placement/orientation, etc. If you get new shoot growth in a better location or point of attachment on the trunk, do you ever remove a previously chosen scaffold and opt to keep the “new” one?
While making scaffold selections this summer, on some of the trees I have selected 4 scaffolds to hedge my bets, and also because I can be indecisive. A couple years ago I added 6 trees and was very strict and chose only 3 scaffolds. Then later that summer some of our cattle got into the orchard. Three of the 6 peach trees had one scaffold ripped completely off by a cow with an itchy head. So on those trees I have only 2 scaffolds and scars still working on healing over. So on this next group of 6 that I planted, I decided to go with 4, and maybe remove one of those scaffolds next year if all goes well. Is that a bad idea?
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Yes, I actually do that quite a bit. Sometimes there isn’t as much choice as I’d like choosing scaffolds, then later a better scaffold appears (maybe it has better collar formation). I’ll cut the old scaffold off and select the new one.
When we planted the first peach trees in the larger orchard, I chose many scaffolds too low to the ground (for the bottom scaffold). It didn’t matter with a backyard orchard. But for a commercial orchard, I couldn’t get equipment under the bottom scaffolds for mowing/spraying. I ended up cutting off the bottom scaffold of a lot of trees. These trees already had fairly sizeable scaffolds (probably 3" in diameter at the time). The trees still filled in, one way or another. Vigorous peach trees are that way. They will fill in even with two scaffolds.
I used to use 4 scaffolds, for much of the same reason you mention. I would end up cutting one scaffold out as the tree became too crowded. But this would leave a hole in about 1/4 of the area, which took awhile to fill back in. Eventually I just started selecting 3 scaffolds. But either way works, it just works better for us to start with 3 scaffolds.
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Since there is so much discussion of pruning on this thread, I thought I’d post a couple of good pruning videos from Mike Parker (NCSU). I’ve posted these many times before, but perhaps some have not seen them.
He doesn’t cover everything about pruning in the videos. For example, he doesn’t discuss collar formation, vertical distance between scaffolds (scaffolds which originate too close to one another on the trunk will generally result in scaffolds above them not being very vigorous). He also doesn’t discuss good collar formation on primary branches which come off the scaffolds. Those also need to have good collar formation, or they may break off, which used to happen on our trees quite often. Also I’m pretty much done pruning in the dormant season. Pruning peach trees very much before or during winter is a losing proposition in my locale, and pruning in the beginning of spring really just removes too many fruit buds, which may be needed after spring frosts.
But overall the videos are very good for anyone learning to prune peach trees.
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How to know if a lateral has any fruit buds?