Out of curiosity, I went out to check my 2 pawpaw trees. Shenandoah looks like having included bark right where two branches came off the trunk. Absolutely bad location.
Well, can’t do anything now. Whatever happens, happens. It is 5 years old and grow ever slowly. It is full of flowers.
The Mango have braches with good angle. The tree is a lot bigger, too. Have not seen a flower bud yet.
Good eye - yes that first one is one dimensional, for now at least.
I think I’ll remove the 2 lowest branches.
They are too low anyway and this will eliminate the crowding their vertical growth has created.
Im not a 100% sure you can’t do anything. skillcut has a video somewhere where het cuts a V below into the branche to bend it more outward.
Also, when in doubt it might be worth it to cut a little bit into the ridge where you suspect bark inclusion. If you see a black line you know you gotta act. Nice white wood or cambium and your fine. If your really lucky the callus on the cut might grow over the inclusion, and fill up the angle enough to have it not bark include.
Unfortunately I only thought about getting a photo moments after I was done. Maybe it was a little less than 40 in retrospect, but not by much. Definitely an inclusion.
That tree had it’s central leader eaten off by a deer in 2019. What grew back were closely spaced whorls of branches. The new top branches had tight angles, the lower ones were better. Those top ones were the ones with inclusions. This probably had some affect. I haven’t had issues with inclusions on my 8 other pawpaws.
And yes I know deer aren’t supposed to eat pawpaw branches and that the leaves are toxic to them. My deer are evil.
Deer do eat most things once in awhile. Though pawpaw isn’t a favorite, it’s not poisonous like eating iris or daffodils would be. Cows also will eat low branches off pawpaws in pastures.
Deer eat my pawpaw if not protected
I got a little happy with the pruning shears yesterday on my pawpaws.
I hope I didn’t go too far.
Another issue i had last year had to do with the top 2 buds on the trees. basically the lower of the top 2 buds tried to overtake the true apical bud to become the central leader. In other words, the second bud from top grew at a very narrow/vertical angle while the actual apical bud grew straight up.
I had maybe 4 trees with this situation.
So yesterday i removed all those “competing” branches (during the growing season, once I noticed this was happening, I pinched off the competing branch tips, which helped a lot).