JONA
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Location: Sussex. England

Re: Growing apple trees from seed

Hi sammus
I agree with tomc those strong uprights should go.
You say that you don't want to do too much training of your trees and you want them to grow strong.
The problem of leaving really strong growth though is that the tree can get out of the habit of cropping and just ...grow....
By controlling strong shoots you force the tree to give you weaker fruit bud bearing shoots. These do the job of controlling your tree then without having to keep forever heavy pruning.
Just let the head of your tree grow strongly until it reaches the height that you want the tree to be, then stop it at that point by only allowing the weaker shoots to remain.

RoryDavid
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Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:32 am

Good Advice. I agree with you and also need of very much patience and take care of little plants especially fruits categories. Don't forget watering.

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Gary350
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Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:59 pm
Location: TN. 50 years of gardening experience.

I recently learned the new preferred way to trim an apple tree is funnel shape so sunlight can get inside to fully ripen all the fruit. I worked in an apple & peach orchard 1968 and 1969 they trimmed their trees a special way to produce more fruit and allow more sunlight to get in to ripen fruit. Fruit will be hard as a pine board with not enough sun light. I am not a very good artist here is a picture I drew hope you get the idea funnel shape from the picture. I never learned how to fertilize fruit trees working at the orchard but I did learn they fertilize very heavy until tree is a certain height before they ever trim the tree. Once tree is large enough to be trimmed they want the root system to be 2 times larger than the trimmed tree this provides tree & fruit with enough food & water to grow lots of large fruit.

When we lived at the other house we had a 15 year old apple tree that had never made an apple. No internet back then all the information I had and tried did not work. Then I saw a TV show how to grow apples they said the worse thing home growers do is not trim their tree enough. You should trim it until you think, OH NO I cut off too much. TV show also said, trees need full sun all day other wise fruit will never be ripe. I cut down a 40 ft tall tree so apple got more sun. Every Sunday after church I gave the tree 1 cup 15/15/15 fertilizer and 1 cup Ammonium nitrate and 5 gallons of water. Tree filled out and grew 3 ft taller but following year I trimmed it and kept fertilizing it and the tree produced 14 bushes of ripe red apples. We put 40 quart mason jars of apply pie filling in the pantry and gave away 10 bushels of apples.

I am going to plant, 2 apple trees, 2 peach trees, 2 blueberry plants this year.
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JONA
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Posts: 812
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2014 7:11 am
Location: Sussex. England

In the garden situation I think the bowl shaped tree is the most picturesque too.
Pruning on the whole is easier as it’s a more’ relaxed ‘ shape and as Gary says it’s the perfect shape for good light to get at the fruit.
In the orchard situation or in a garden where space is tight the centre leader form of growing is much more common.
First thing is the tree will come into crop earlier . ( to get a bowl shaped tree it has to be cut quite low in the maiden year to induce the required branching..this cuts a couple of years of its run to full cropping).
Secondly of course is the area needed.
You can plant four centre leader trees in the space one bowl tree needs.
One thing to remember too is the rootstock.
An open centre tree is better if the stock has a little more “ power “ than some of the more dwarfing stocks.
106 or equivalent or stronger.
27 or 9 would struggle to make a good open centre tree. .....and would need staking all their life because of the poor root system.



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