Tip bearing apples - high density planting pruning techniques ?

[Lardman]

Most of my trees are grown in restricted form for space saving reasons, as a result I've stayed away from the tip bearers. What's the point if Im going to cut most if not all of the fruit buds off.

I've been reading more and more about the tall spindle system being pushed to commercial orchards over the pond. It's basically high density planting on dwarfing stock with no scaffold branches. Each year a proportion of the trees main limbs are thinned to produce new growth - nothing is permanent other than the trunk.

Surely by doing this it must be possible to train a tip bearer to be productive without the blind wood on the older parts of the branch effectively creating a hairy cordon? Not as high yielding or as small as a spur but much better and with a smaller footprint than a bush.

Im happy to give it a go for a few year but wondered if anyone else had tried it before I go reinventing the wheel again

[FB.]

Perform nicking and notching to increase branching which means more branch tips.

Use thinning cuts rather than heading cuts when pruning to increase branching and to reduce the loss of tips.

[MarkPelican]

Is there a good description of how to prune tip bearing apples? I've got a Discovery tree (at least I think it is) in my garden and I want to thin it out/prune it back because its getting tangled but I don't know how to prune it in a way that will still let it crop next year.

[FB.]

Is there a good description of how to prune tip bearing apples?

Yes.
1. Don't neglect pruning or it'll cause a lot of problems when you try to do several years worth all in one go.
2. Try to anticipate where shoots are going and how they might interfere with other shoots in the future, and perform suitable pruning before a problem arises.
3. With tip bearers, don't use shears nor hedge trimmers or you'll lose lots of tips and not see much fruit for a few years, and in the meantime with no energy going into fruit the tree will grow even larger than it was before.
4. With tip bearers, aim for thinning cuts instead of heading cuts. Walk round the tree and see how you can achieve what you want with the least number of pruning cuts.

[Lardman]

Cheers FB. Im not overly concerned about yield or the aesthetics of the tree it's more of an experiment into which tip bearers may warrant growing so I want to pack them in tightly.

In the scenario I described aren't all the cuts considered heading cuts? the entire branch stays there until it's too big then off with it to regrow another from the base, there's no other pruning done. I can see this will probably limit the fruiting branch to a singular entity but it would keep the cordon compact.

Im sort of there with a badly pruned and neglected bramley.

[FB.]

.....In the scenario I described aren't all the cuts considered heading cuts? .

Removal of a shoot or branch at its point of origin is a thinning cut.
Cutting a shoot part-way along its length is a heading cut.

If you need to remove 25% of a tree, it's better to lose 25% of the shoots in their entirety and leave 75% undisturbed than it is to prune 25% off the end of all shoots. In the first scenario 75% of the fruiting tips remain, in the second no tips remain.

Tip buds produce hormones which regulate how the buds lower down the tree behave so by retaining as many tip buds as possible (whether they're fruiting buds or shoot buds) it improves hormone balances within the tree that encourage good wide branch angles of new shoots.
Removing tips makes all the dormant buds lower down the shoot think they're the tip and they all grow in a tight narrow-angled mass like a witches broom.

[FB.]

I'll see if I can get some pictures of what happened after I used thinning cuts last winter.

[Lardman]

Pictures paint 1000 words (hopefully)

The large vertical in all of these is the main trunk. Ignore the weeds or anything else unpleasant you might see The tree is around 5ft and potted in garden soil on M26.


Would you call this a heading or thinning cut ?


This is what Im attempting to get, buds on very short stumpy branches close to the trunk at every node.


Here's an example of something I may cut this year - It's not too far from the trunk and set fruit may reduce it's vigour but it's creeping out and a cut this year may could bring the branch back in production in 2018. It's pretty much the same as the branch I cut to produce picture 1.

[Lardman]

.. and here's a keeper. I'll be leaving this as is for 2017 and possibly 2018 depending on growth. Sorry for the fat fingers in the background camera wouldn't focus - but it does give an idea of scale.

[MarkPelican]

Yes.
1. Don't neglect pruning or it'll cause a lot of problems when you try to do several years worth all in one go.
2. Try to anticipate where shoots are going and how they might interfere with other shoots in the future, and perform suitable pruning before a problem arises.
3. With tip bearers, don't use shears nor hedge trimmers or you'll lose lots of tips and not see much fruit for a few years, and in the meantime with no energy going into fruit the tree will grow even larger than it was before.
4. With tip bearers, aim for thinning cuts instead of heading cuts. Walk round the tree and see how you can achieve what you want with the least number of pruning cuts.

Thanks FB. I think that's useful (if I understand properly what you've said). So, with the Discovery, I should aim to thin it out going back to the point where the branch grows out, rather than cutting branches back a bit from the end. That's what I thought I had to do but looking around the tree and seeing how it fruited in previous years made me think I would lose most of the fruit. I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and hope I get it right.

[Lardman]

That's what I thought I had to do but looking around the tree and seeing how it fruited in previous years made me think I would lose most of the fruit.

Ken muir has a good straightforward guide http://www.kenmuir.co.uk/image/data/...ar%20Trees.pdf for pruning , if you take a look at the section referred to as renewal pruning it might make that cut a little easier Suffer a little this year for better fruit in 2018, by doing that across the tree in stages perhaps 1/3 of the tree each year you keep the fruit and vegetative growth in balance. Tough regime to start with though if the tree already has a lot of blind wood.