Training and shaping a pear tree to modified central leader by pruning, dis-budding and notching, v.s. the common recommendation to head back the leaders and scaffold branches of fruit trees. More below... Smart Tree Training Playlist:
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Pruning and training young fruit trees can be a confusing subject. There is good reason for that. There are a lot of different methods and ideas to sort through. The most common recommendation to head back has not worked very well for me. Heading back, or cutting the tree back to a single stem is the way most people recommend. It tends to create many branches that are very close together, while a stronger tree is formed by the modified central leader and delayed open center forms, on which branches are spaced farther apart. A better way in my experience to get further spaced branches is to use a combination of notching and disbudding, where most of the buds you are sure you don't want to grow are removed, and several buds are chosen to be the main scaffold branches and notched. Notching fruit tree buds consists of cutting a small notch through the bark just above a bud, causing it to want to grow out. notching overcomes apical dominance and the branch can grow out. These methods of fruit tree training have been known for a long time, but to my knowledge they have never been put together into a sort of system like this. Most of my experience is with apples and pears, so I don't know how consistently they will work on other species like persimmon, plum, peach, etc. They will work some of the time though and no system of training fruit trees is 100% reliable. Training trees is an art, not a science and living things are unpredictable. But you could hardly do worse than just chopping your tree off and hoping some branches grow back in the right places. If you are training to a modified central leader or delayed open center, it is almost certain the they will not actually. I am inclined to think that the standard recommendations for training our fruit trees can be improved into something that is easy to understand and carry out. I also would like to see a move toward maidens, aka whips, which are one year trees usually with no side branches, v.s. the branched or "feathered" two year old trees commonly available now. I would like to do a full on one or two part lecture series on this subject outlining what we do and do not know, what the future might look like and experiments that need to be done to determine how a system like this will perform in seeking various specific forms on different species and varieties of fruit trees. But I make very little money on this type of content and it doesn't grow my channel, even if it could have a profound long term social impact. So, until I can generate more income or funding for this type of private, independent research, it will have to take a back seat to shorter, dumbed down content for mass consumption. Bummer, but only so many people are willing to support or view this level of content. You can help by sharing, viewing, commenting and financial support through patreon or paypal.
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