Training / pruning for apple cordons

[muckledug]

Bought a few 2 year old bare-rooted m9 apple trees at end March / beginning April. The place I want to plant them is not available yet - so I potted them up with the intention of moving them in dormancy to their permanent home and training them as cordons.

My plan was to leave all pruning / training until then. The RHS website says that, once they are in place, I should cut back all laterals longer than 4 inches to 3 buds. This means I will be pruning into the previous years growth and that some of the laterals will be reduced to no more than 2 or 3 inches in length.

Can that be right?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Ninetrees]

I would guess that the guidance is based on a dormant season planting, and so it would the previous season's growth being cut back anyway? I pruned my freshly planted apples in March, and yes, some of the shorter stems were only a few inches. They're already going great guns now, though.

[muckledug]

Thanks for your reply. And yes, I presumed they were referring to a dormant season planting too. I wasn't very clear when I said that I would be cutting into the 'previous years growth'. What I meant was the year prior to the growing season just finished. Sorry about that. I don't know if that means the buds behind the cut on this older wood would struggle to become active.
Nice pics on your blog, by the way!

[FB.]

If they need any pruning it will be in peak summer (mid-July to early-August) and/or during winter (December-February).
Post some pictures in the first half of July.

[muckledug]

If they need any pruning it will be in peak summer (mid-July to early-August) and/or during winter (December-February).
Post some pictures in the first half of July.

Yep, it's going to be one or the other - or both!

In this neck of the woods, it's probably going to be mid August before new shoots are starting to mature - so I'll post a few pics then.

Thanks again for your replies.

[FB.]

Sorry, I should have been clearer.

I always inspect my fruit trees and bushes twice per year. At each inspection I decide whether each tree needs any pruning at that time.

Summer pruning and winter pruning achieve very different aims and it is important to prune in the correct way at the correct time or your tree may not achieve what you want.

I tailor the type and timing of pruning to meet the needs of each tree in each season. Not all trees need the same pruning nor at the same time. Some years a tree won't need pruning at all, but in other years it may need quite a lot of pruning.

If you post some pictures in July it will be possible to determine if the tree needs pruning and what would be the best pruning cuts to make......or whether the tree would be best pruned in winter......or maybe won't need any pruning at all for another year.

Or you could post some pictures now and it might be possible to literally nip any problems in the bud (yes, I sometimes pinch-out shoots in early summer to guide the growth and avoid the need for other types of pruning later).

[muckledug]

Thanks for your reply, FB. I had been considering doing a pre-emptive nip and tuck on them. There are 2 Pixie apple trees, neither of which has set any fruit and I thought they would be candidates for a 'modified lorette' summer pruning job.

I didn't buy the trees as cordons, they're supposedly 2 year olds on M9. They both look healthy enough, although growth hasn't been rampant since I potted them up.

There's also a Discovery which is stronger but oddly shaped. It has set fruit and I'm intending to allow 4 or 5 to grow on. I've read plenty on pruning but, given I've no practical experience, I feel a bit lost.

I'll take some pics - hopefully tomorrow.
Thanks again.

[muckledug]

Got there eventually. Here's a few pics to show the state of play.

The first pic is of the bigger of my 2 Pixie trees. The 2nd is the same tree zoomed in on the leader. 3rd pic is of the smaller of the 2 Pixie trees (leader unpruned). The 4th pic is of my weirdly shaped 'Discovery'. All 3 are on m9.

[FB.]

Were those plants sold to you as cordons? They look as if they were bush-trained and their shape is far more suited to semi-dwarf bush training than to cordon training.

It is going to be a long and difficult challenge (and some years without any fruit as a result) to get them into cordon shape because they have so much growth at the top and so little growth lower down.

I would continue to let them grow as semi-dwarf bushes and prune/train them as such during the winter by cutting the new growth back by about half in December-February; they look like they are forming fruit spurs and they should fruit next year if you just leave them alone whereas if you start trying to shape them as cordons the wood with spurs on may need to be removed and it'll probably be at least two or three years before they fruit (depending on how they responded to dramatic reshaping).

[muckledug]

Thank you so much for your reply, FB. Things are as I feared. As you say, it looks like they have been trained as bushes. To be fair, they were not sold specifically as cordons - nor were they described as bushes.
I'll probably keep them potted up as I don't really have a good place for them.
Lesson learned... I'll buy partially trained cordons (or maidens) at the end of the year.