Remember how I pruned and trained my peach trees to the open center system last winter?  A good orchardist would have done a followup pruning and training in June, but I missed the boat and only just now got around to my summer pruning.  As you can see in the photo on the left, water sprouts had sprung up vertically from the center of the tree, so I had to do a lot of cutting.  Optimally, these water sprouts would have been trimmed back when they were much shorter so that all of that energy would have gone into growth of the main branches.

Last winter's technique of training the tree with yarn seems to have worked very well.  Sunday, I cut off the old pieces of yarn since they were starting to grow into the branches.  (Once again, this would have been better done six weeks ago.)  I was expecting branches to spring back to their former vertical form, but instead they sat just where I'd trained them --- success!  So I added a few new training yarns back in to hold down lengthened branches and called it a day.

Shame-faced plug: Check out our new Avian Aqua Miser website full of information about the home made chicken waterers which fund this blog.

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.