I’m growing my first peach tree currently, it was planted bareroot last spring (2022) and I have basically not pruned it at all, other than removing some branches near ground level. It’s basically a densely bushy shape now with lots of options for scaffolds.
I was thinking that I should wait until dormancy to select the initial scaffolds until I saw your posts in this thread. Is it better to do that now instead, to allow them to fill in as you describe?
I can see the fruit buds now on my first year nectarine, pluot, and apricot trees. Mostly the fruit buds present as three buds at a node. The outer two are fruit buds.
My plan will probably be to leave all that wood next spring. After fruit set, I’ll keep fruit low on each shoot and cut off at least half the shoot. Cutting back to keep the tree small. Not the right plan if your tree hasn’t fill out it’s space yet. I want fruit year two and should get some.
No it’s not. That wood is way too young. Look farther down on the branch at the older nodes. That’s where you’ll see the fruit buds sooner. On peach/nectarine it takes some time for the buds to form. On apricot and pluot they show sooner.
Seattle is quite a bit different from here. But I can tell you here, we select scaffolds in the summer. Today I selected more scaffolds from more 2022 trees. I thought I’d take a before and after pic.
Here is a 2022 tree. Actually I selected scaffolds already last year, for this tree. But the tree was bushy, so I pruned it. Here is the before and after, along with a top down view.
I prefer to prune in the summer time, as long as there is time left for more growth.
Btw, I know the weed control is terrible, but we sprayed for weeds on the rows today.
I found this on the internet, it was helpful to me in identifying peach fruit buds vs leaf buds on current growth season wood when I harvested peach scion wood.
They say 1 year old wood but it’s really the new wood from the past growing season. Or a better way to think about it might be the current growth season wood that is now dormant.
When dormant, leaf buds are pointy tipped and singular. Flower buds are round tipped and in clusters of two or three buds grouped together
Hope this is helpful
Right now both leaf and flower buds are pointy or at least small. By fall or winter the flower buds will be bigger and more rounded. I’ll see if I can get a picture but they’re small and hard to photograph.
Nectarine and then pluot. Flower buds are growing rapidly and bigger, more rounded, than last time I looked. These are first year trees planted in February.
Still hard to see. You can’t see the vegetative bud in the middle. But the two fat buds spread apart at the base of the petiole are flower buds.
Thanks for sharing the pictures. I don’t see such development on my young peach tree or Aprium trees.
FWIW, I started training my young Oregon Curl Free purchased this spring in a 7" pot. I think it’s working out pretty well IMO. I am in Portland, OR.
Mid-May after transplanted into a 10g pot.
Mid-July
The tree pictured in the pot is too young to see fruit buds. The wood is too immature. By September you might have a few fruit buds. It will probably be 2025 before you can expect fruit.
My trees are so tightly spaced and my growing season is so long that I need to go for fruit asap. Some fruit will slow them down a bit. But peaches have to be very dry to stop growing in summer. Apricots and pluots are more likely to stop growing. Apples stop at the first sign of water deficit.
So, inspired by this thread I went and hacked off a bunch of growth on my Oregon Curlfree. I realized I forgot to take a before photo, but this is after I removed at least 40% of the biomass and it’s probably still way too crowded:
Because this is planted at the base of that stone wall, I’m still encouraging some vertical growth, since it’s barely more than a waist-height bush from the perspective of the upper level, and that’s really the side I’m mostly wanting to access the tree from to harvest:
I’m sure I’ve made some rookie mistakes already, but I assume nothing that can’t be fixed later with the help of all these more experienced peach growers.
Looking good! On mine I also cutback on the branches and the plant created multiple laterals within a week. Also did you spray for PLC on this variety since you have planted it in the ground?
Thank you. How do you make them to goto fruit? when you say your growing season is long you extend your season by growing them inside the green house?
No. It got a small bit of curl this spring (6 leaves or so) and grew out of it quickly. I posted photos here, this was about as bad as it got:
A moderate growth rate probably helps fruit bud set. That’s the case with many fruits. Excessive vigor may reduce fruit bud formation. Young trees are excessively vigorous compared to mature trees. The young tree is focusing on growth to fill out it’s space. An older tree with less vigor sets fruit buds readily.
The young tree may grow 6-10ft. In an older peach tree 12-18 inches of new growth is recommended.
The growing season in my greenhouse is 10.5 months. 1.5 months of chilling and 10.5 with highs of 80-100F.
thats good, I hope the tree will keep up to its name 
Thank you for your replies and posting those videos again. They are worth re-watching. It would be great to see him do a summer pruning video. Based on your advice and our proximity, I do not prune in the winter any more either. I wait until after the last frost/freeze to see what fruit I will have (also based on your recommendations). Thank you for those tips. I don’t have a lot of peaches this year, but I would have a lot less if I had pruned before the last freeze.
Your before and after pictures look quite similar to mine. It’s reassuring to see how much biomass you remove.
I wasn’t sure about choosing a new scaffold a year (or more) later than the original ones were selected. You get quite an unbalanced set of scaffolds, in terms of diameter of the scaffold I mean. But I guess with as fast as peach trees grow, it evens out soon enough.
It would be good to have a few training videos on choosing scaffolds and primary branches on scaffolds, while taking into account collar formation, location and attachment as you mentioned. I have not paid enough attention to this at times, and find weak points of attachment on those primary branches that should have been removed when they were young, It also seems to be very common for most of my varieties to form “Y"s along the scaffolds. I would rather remove one when they are still very small, but have had to cut out some fairly sizeable ones (1”-2") that I hadn’t noticed or maybe didn’t I realize they would become a problem as they grew bigger.
Dr Mike was here a few years ago and showed me the summer pruning technique suggested for our area (central NC). I’m sure the technique changes from location to location. The technique he demonstrated is often used by commercial growers with a short supply of time during a busy season.
He simply snaps off new growth growing toward the center of the tree, especially new growth at the top of the tree that will shade the fruit. He did not use shears, just gloves. He quickly pulls the new undesired growth horizontally and it snaps off easily… Entire process took less that 2 minutes. He removed what looked like a bushel or two of new succulent growth. The undesired growth was thrown on the ground and he moved to the next tree. Next, next, next. He prunes very quickly and it really helps to stop and repeat portions of his video.
I have seen some pictures of commercial peach orchards in other areas that wait until the trees are blooming before they complete dormant pruning so I asked about it. Seems to be a popular idea at Penn State for peaches in their area but he did not like that process for my area.
Only 4 video in his series on Peaches as far as I know.
Edit: The formation of “Y” on scaffolds iis discussed in his last video. Folks from other area in this forum do not recommend it but all of my trees have forks on the main scaffolds and look a lot like the trees in the video.
your trees look lovely. The fruiting moving up in the canopy is something you have trained for a specific reason?
You ask a good question. The fruiting zone has moved up the tree as the trees have grown
We had to cut the height of some of the trees a few years ago with pole mounted chain saws but we normally just use loppers
Also noticed that the low hanging fruit is more susceptible to frost than fruit higher in the tree.
Hard to tell from the picture but we pick almost all the fruit from the ground with no ladders.
Target is 3 bushels per tree in a year with little frost damage.
We found we can produce excellent sweet fruit of the proper size by thinning a lot less than suggested. We could get larger fruit with more thinning but we have found that fruit too large is hard to pack in 1/2 peck bags. Also we do not head most of the fruiting wood like Dr Mike shows in his video. The excess fruit load causes these branches to invert downwards. You can see some of that in the picture
