North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Terence Bradshaw <tblists@pshift.com>]

Jason:

Save yourself trouble down the road and lop them off with a dutch cut.  
That's a slanted cut where you leave a longer stub at the bottom of the 
branch and cut the top all the way to the collar.  This allows for 
adventitious buds on the underside to break, allowing the limb to renew 
at a good crotch angle.  Of course it the limb is rally quite low (knee 
high or less) you should lop it off flush.  In your third leaf you are 
still establishing the framework of the tree, so you don't want to 
further choke that leader now.

Hope that helps,

TerryB

> From: Jason MacArthur 
> Subject: [NAFEX] apple tree pruning
> To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
> Message-ID: <C9EEAE0A-9643-11DA-BE0F-000393988B62@localnet.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> I have a few dwarf apple trees going into 3rd leaf with lower tier 
> branches which are almost equal to the size of the trunk.  In fact, the 
> trunk narrows significantly above these branches- clearly they are 
> draining significant resources from the central leader.  Reading 
> through the pruning literature there seems to be a great deal of 
> conflicting advice on how to deal with a situation like this, from 
> "never prune  a branch until it's fruited" to "don't bother growing a 
> whole side of the tree you will only need to cut out later".
>         
> 	The longer I wait the larger these branches get, so I am wondering 
> what to do.  Is there any way to significantly slow them down enough to 
> allow the trunk to regain dominance?  Or should I hack the tree back to 
> a whip and start all over?
>         
>         Thanks and happy growing,
>
> Jason MacArthur
> Marlboro, Vt.