Training Young Fruit Trees - A MUST Every Spring

All right, everybody. This is Ross. I wanted to talk to you guys today about training young fruit trees. The advice has really been the same and it should be the same for really forever. I mean, if you read any book, you're kind of gonna hear the same thing. And that really training a young fruit tree is really to set the tree's life up for the maximum sunlight to get as much photosynthesis as possible. You know, not just the photosynthesis that, of course, where you plant the fruit tree, there's only a limited amount of hours in this particular spot, right? But if I were to bend the branches or prune the tree in the correct way, well, then I can maximize the amount of light in those given amount of hours. And by doing this, training the tree, especially when it's young and not yet as established as we'd all like them to be, well, this is the perfect time to set the tree's life up to have a good life. You know, we're putting the building blocks in. These are the important building blocks. So essentially, what I'm trying to do and think of with every fruit tree I grow is light, as we just mentioned. But to maximize light, we just have to simply bend the branches away from each other. I could get even, you know, I guess more critical or more particular with this particular persimmon tree here. This is a Sajo that I grafted years ago, and hopefully it actually puts out some fruit this year. That'd be nice. Sajo definitely is one of my favorite persimmons that I've gotten eaten in the past. And I'd love to be able to compare this Sajo with some other persimmons I grow. But I could, you know, very easily take this branch, you know, potentially a permanent scaffold of this tree and really start to bend it a little bit outwards more. With persimmons, you don't have to necessarily worry too much about that. They tend to grow outwards on their own because they have heavy fruit set and the limbs get very lanky. And a lot of the limbs end up kind of bending themselves horizontally and towards the ground anyway. So there's not a ton, but rather than maybe, you know, pruning out a crisscrossing branch or a branch that's just going in the wrong direction, I've done what you see here. I've gotten myself a bamboo stake. I've bent the limb, attached it to the stake. And now this tree has just a better form going into this season. Now that the trees are waking up and getting their start. And every tree is a little bit different, you know. As an example, this plot here is kind of the Dave Wilson nursery style of planting fruit trees. And I've learned that really maximizing that sunlight is ultra critical with this planting. And with this young green gauge plum, which is extremely susceptible to disease pressure of getting rot. Although they are really the most tasty plum or one of the most tastiest plums you could grow. And that's why it's worth growing. But if you're not careful about disease, you're not really careful about training the tree when it's young and setting this tree up to have a more open habit. Well, you're really gonna struggle with that disease. The other thing on top of this, by the way, that we need to do, I need to do when I come in here in the summer, because this plum puts out fruits late in the summer or in the early fall. It's definitely a very late to ripen plum. And at that time, we typically have a lot more disease pressure, a lot more humidity. So I need to really be on top of this tree throughout the summer before the tree actually ripens the plums and stay on top of the summer pruning. There's a great video by Dan Newtboom, who's a grower in the UK. He's an old man. I love that guy. And he does a video describing how to actually prune a green-gauge plum. And he's kept this green-gauge plum over many years. I think it's like 15 or 20 years that he's had it. And he's kept it very small, actually even lower than his own height. So it's kind of how you really should approach most of these fruit trees, is that the only way that he's able to achieve that or someone like myself to keep them even low or disease-free is by doing something like this, where either we use something like a stake that I mentioned, or we even just tie twine here. I have some twine that I've tied to some landscape rock. I'll show you that in a second. You can tie it to other materials like rocks. You know, whatever it is that you can do to actually bend these branches downwards. Because otherwise, you know, these branches were straight up in the air. And the tree likes to just grow straight up in the air. I mean, that's what most trees will do. So to bend this outwards, to maximize that light, we're now getting light along this portion of the branch. Whereas before, we're only really getting light on this higher portion of the branch because it's growing straight up in the air, right? Just think about the dimensions. It's kind of similar to what we're looking at over here with this particular branch, is that now that this branch is on an angle, we're making use of this space, not just this space up here. So we're getting a lot better fruit set. You could even make an argument by maximizing that sunlight. We can grow fruit on a wider surface area of the tree and at a higher quality. So that's really critical. And that's just what I'm doing. I went around the yard to every single fruiting plant I have. Some of these are a bit more difficult. You know, like a lot of these young, I shouldn't say young, these smaller bushes, that's what I meant to say. So something like this Yostaberry here, or even something over there like the Honeyberry, these are just small, compact bushes. And I tried myself, especially with this Yostaberry, it's very vigorous, I've learned, as well as the other Yostaberry over there, to kind of control the size a little bit. And that's mainly been my own concern, or keeping a lot of the branches, let's say, that were kind of growing along the ground, I pruned those out. Or the branches that weren't getting enough light, maybe they were gonna be shaded throughout the season, well, I pruned that out. But most of these bushes, it's hard to really affect this beyond what they naturally like to do. So yeah, I went around to every tree and every bush, but for certain things, there's only so much you can do. Here's an example of something we did over here to the pear tree, where the pear likes to be grown as a pyramid. And you can kind of see that, well, we have a stake there, and then we have a stake over here. So I'm kind of creating that triangle, if you connect the dots, this creates a triangle, a pyramid. So we're opening this up a bit. Of course, that's the natural habit, you don't wanna kind of deviate from that, depending on the tree, whereas the persimmon over here will grow mostly as a central leader, but you can grow them as an open center. And that's kind of what I like to default to, is eventually take out this middle section here, as you see this little piece, we can take that out and actually really make it an open center. But now I have one, two, three, four scaffolds, potentially a few more, if I wanna make this a bit of a taller tree in the future. But again, this has got a great form to it, how a lot of the branches are going out and away, they have their own section of the tree. We're maximizing the light without a doubt. Here's the pawpaw actually, and some people recommend that you don't prune pawpaws. Well, Michael Judd, one of the people who really promotes them, maybe you could even consider him an expert of pawpaws, he prunes his pawpaws. Not that I have pruned mine this year really all that much, other than taking out some crisscrossing branches, some things that here are in the center of the trees, I actually have two pawpaws planted in the same hole. But you can see actually, I've definitely taken the stake, driven it into the ground and really tried to open this up a bit more to maximize the sunlight that these trees will reach this season. You know, nature does a good job, but we can intervene and even do a slightly better job, right? Here's the Gumi, done a very similar thing recently to this one, where these big long water shoots that come up, and you can tell the color of these long water shoots because they're a bit of a bronze color, whereas the growth that doesn't grow very quickly and is a bit older, well, it has a silverish gray appearance, but these long water shoots, they tend to get out of control and instead of pruning them out like I actually intended to this year, decided to just open the tree up, the bush up a bit, excuse me, and make more use, excuse me, of the space that it has. So that's one way to do it, obviously. And that's kind of one method of really thinking about what to do with your young tree. Here's another example over here of a freshly, this is, you know, a quince here, and this tree was really just planted. Last year, it got taken back, hit really hard by a tree that fell on top of it, pretty much broke the tree. I had to make a cut right there. Then the tree grew some nice limbs from lower down and was able to survive. And then at the beginning of this season, I made more cuts right here to really encourage that lower branching that we're looking for to get that good lower branching that most of us want on our young fruit trees and that we're trying to keep to a reasonable height. So I think that's really the lesson. You know, I keep driving that point home, but, you know, I think this is such an important thing. And obviously, again, it's not any new information, but it is certainly some of the best information. So I think we all need a reminder of this, even though it's been probably repeated many times. But yeah, so thanks for watching this one, guys. We'll catch you for the next one. Hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed it, and we'll see you guys for the next video. Take care.