the root system needs the energy from those leaves to get ready for winter. Wait until Feb- March to prune. That is plenty of time to learn more about the whys and hows. I would be looking for another variety or two to graft on for pollen. Do a few grafts to increase your odds of success. You don't have much trunk protection there. Tree is still young enough to horribly injured if you have any deer at all coming there. You need a plan for pruning. If you were to read various random posts around the web you will see the term "be brutal" but be smart instead. It may appear brutal, but that has nothing to do with the strategy. Establish what will be your scaffold branches.. these are the ones you will want to have as your permanent sructural branches. you want them low on the tree and ideally 45 degrees (between horizontal and straight up). If needed you can adjust their angle with a weight on the ground and string, in the spring. Those scaffolds should not be blocking each others sun. prune away stuff like that. Also prune away any growing straight up other then your main center, which you can cut it shorter, it will restart itself. You need to pull down the height quite a bit. Keep reading this forum. Magazines, blogs and youtube are loaded with people who don't know what they are doing, but pretending they do.

Well, obviously that tree doesn't want to die! There's going to be a lot of lush, thick new growth that will have to be dealt with, but much of it is going to be higher than eight feet. It would be easier to keep it at 12 feet, though, and that's a manageable height. Either way it's going to take a lot of direction and correction. As for the one in the background, I think it wants about 50% of the green removed, but I may be wrong- it might be as high as 75%! But I'll let somebody who knows what they're talking about address it in more detail. It looks to me like somebody whacked it off pretty hard three years ago or so and now it's past ready to be simplified and put to use. What about that young growth in the foreground of the picture? If that's a sucker from the first tree (the one that is so severely cut back) it might well be fruiting in two or three years, and could be a well-behaved alternative to keeping the bigger tree, which is going to take a lot of work. I may be out of my depth here, and others should know to say so, but that's the way I see it for the moment. Good luck, Mark You have a lot of material to work with, so be prepared to haul off a lot of waste.

I will prune it in early spring, but I have a few questions. Is it fine if I prune 5-10% of the tree? I would like to keep a few small branches in a V shape. Can this harm the tree? I want to remove all the top branches. No point in keeping them, can't even reach that high. I've read that pruning a lot during summer can potentially kill an apricot tree (bleeding it to death), but I'm assuming it would be safe to do it while it's dormant? I've marked the branches that I plan to keep. I will apply a copper spray fungicide on them next week. A week later, I will apply a chlorothalonil fungicide just for some extra protection. In early spring, I will remove the rest of the branches, apply copper spray fungicide. When the leaves open up, chlorothalonil will be applied. Assuming that there would be a lot of new growth in summer, the following spring, I will prune out all the old branches and only keep the new ones. All this just to make sure that the disease is hopefully completely gone. Does this sound like a good plan? This post was edited by Ghadames on Wed, Oct 22, 14 at 22:35

In my opinion, for the 2nd year tree, I would either remove flower buds now or let them flowers (if you want to see how beautiful it looks) and remove all flowering clusters after that. Such a young tree should waste energy to produce fruit in its 2nd year. Let the tree uses its energy to grow and establish. You'll get better a return of your investment in the long run. Also, young trees often abort their fruitlets when they are not ready. I'd rather help the tree now before it goes that far.