On 16/03/2017 09:09, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 16/03/17 00:53, MaxDread wrote:


Thanks for the comments and advice. I've asked on some other forums, and
been reading and watching videos. There's plenty to think about! It's
quite a tricky topic for a newcomer as people seem to approach it in
such vastly different ways, both in terms of the finer details and the
major ones such as whether to even prune or not!

Don't forget that no matter how much time and effort you spend on the
tree it will do what it wants to do. That usually means alternate good
and poor cropping years. And in the good cropping years you will find
you won't know what to do with the vast surplus of fruit you will get.
In the end I stuck bags of apples outside on a table and left a notice
telling passers by to just take what they wanted!


Apart from my Japanese pear tree which is a martyr to early frosts
zapping the flowers and late ones harming the fruit before it is ripe
enough to pick my trees seem fairly well behaved. I have a family tree
of Sunset on Egremont Russett (the latter being far more vigorous) which
does take more careful pruning to maintain a balance but the ordinary
trees can be pretty much left to get on with it and pruning done only to
maintain a size and shape that fits the garden.

You can tweak the trees performance a bit more by summer and winter
pruning but I have never bothered. I only prune in winter when the
skeleton shape is more obvious and maintain a classic goblet shape (more
or less). Trees will be trees and there is no point in fighting it
unless you are training up against a wall as a cordon. We get way more
apples than we can sensibly eat even in a poor fruiting year.

We do swaps with neighbours for plums (where pruning is inadvisable).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown