Nice photo Kendra. Your 1st picture looks like the beginnings of South West injury. To stop this from getting worse paint your tree with a flat white interior latex paint in a 50/50 water to paint ratio. Heres a link if you have any questions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qJtVd2k_lI With so many trees I would go to a big box store. Tell them what you are doing. Ask them to put a half gallon of interior white flat latex paint in a one gallon bucket. When you get home fill it the rest of the way with water and shake it up and you are ready to go. Most of your trees look like someone had tried to prune them into a Delayed Open Center form which is fine. However the work on some of them was never completed or they were left to do their own thing and the trees have been neglected for along time. There certainly is a lot of pruning that needs to be done. There is also more than one way to go about it depending on what form you ultimately want the trees to take. Here is a link that may be helpful but is not directed at older neglected trees. It will however give you some ideas that may be helpful and has good descriptions of each tree form. http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/ag29.html I see lots of advice and people trying to tell you what you should do. I dont think we are that point yet. There are at least three basic tree forms you should be considering. Each with its own advantages and disadvantages. They all have their merits and only you can decide which one is right for you and your family. A few things to keep in mind.. You do not have to prune them all the same form. Even if you decide to train them all to the same form you do not need to do them all at once. Apples are usually trained to one of three forms. They are "Central Leader" "Open Center" and sometimes "Delayed Open Center" You should read the descriptions from the link I provided above as I will not be describing them in any detail here. Instead I will give my personal take on what I think are important to the home orchardist and your trees in particular. Central Leader Trees trained to this form are tall Christmas tree shaped trees. They have good fruit production. The disadvantage is that they are tall which makes spraying, picking and pruning harder as you will need ladders and long reach pickers. The trees that look like they were left to their own designs from the start may be a good candidate for this form. Not that you cannot train these trees to either of the other two forms but this may be the easiest and quickest form to achieve with these trees. To do this you would start by cutting any dead or diseased wood then move on the crossing branches that rub. After this cut any branches with bad crotch angles then cut any wood that is growing toward the center of the tree. The next step would be to thin out the branches to let in light and air. You dont want to have scaffold branches all attached at the same pint on the trunk. If you can have them spaced vertically on the trunk 6" or more apart and branching off in different directions. Open Center/Vase Trees trained to this form have less production than the other two forms. However this form has other advantages. They are much shorter which makes them easy to prune, easy to pick and easy to spray and easy to inspect for diseases and infestations. I see none of your trees pruned to this form. If you were going to change to this form you would have to severely top your trees and you would not get any fruit the first season. With trees the size you have there would be some debate whether you should top them in one radical cut or over two seasons. If you chose this form and the trees are still dormant I think I would go with the more radical approach on the smaller trees. On the larger trees I would cut off all the small twigs and cut the current scaffold branches back severely to like 2-3 out from the trunk. The following year I would cut the trunk at 24"-30" from the ground. If it were me I would do this with the smaller trees in one cut while still dormant. If you chose to do that there is nothing wrong with doing only 1-5 trees the 1st year. That way you can see the results and how the trees respond and learn the pruning steps and how they shape the trees before doing more of them in proceeding years. Delayed Open Center The majority of your trees are trained to this form and you may wish to keep this form. If it were me I would keep this form on all the larger trees that are currently in this form. They still need a lot of pruning though. Start by cutting all the dead wood then move on to cutting the crossing branches that are rubbing against other branches or that may rub when it gets windy. Always preferring the larger healthier branches so long as they are not 50% or larger than 50% of the trunks diameter where they are attached. Then move onto cutting water sprouts and any wood growing toward the center of the tree. After this cut any branches that will shade out other branches preferring the branches that have better crotch angles. Then cut out any small branches or wood that is necessary to allow for good air flow and light penetration and you are done. Remember if you have to cut something because of a bad crotch angle or because its shading out a lower branch or because its diseased it does not mean new branches will not grow to replace them. This is the beauty of pruning. The pruning you do will spur more growth and more branches will grow. Cutting out a bad one will often cause many more to grow and you can then cut off the ones with bad crotch angles or that will rub or shade other branches and keep the best new ones next pruning season. Its all a learning experience and you will get better and faster at it as years go by. Most of the good videos are on Open Center pruning but there are others. If you would like I will post some of the better pruning videos I have found if you think you will have time to view them.

Thanks Mr Baby and Harvestman, you've been most helpful. Guess i do not need to "stick" another tree in the ground for pollination. Found this at Naturehills.com: Pink Ladyî Apple, which is also known as the Cripps Pink variety, is a new hot climate apple from Western Australia. Pink Lady is a very good apple for those of you south of the Mason-Dixon line. It is a large apple with a pink blush over a yellow undertone with no russetting. The flesh is creamy and crisp. The flesh resists browning when cut. It has a sweet-tart taste similar to, but generally rated better than Granny Smith. Pink Ladyî (Cripps Pink Variety) maturity date is 10-15 days after Granny Smiths. This apple tree does not need a pollinator. Pink Ladyî (Cripps Pink Variety)\ will not mature properly in USA in zone 5, due to low autumn temperatures.>>> Much relieved down here in the deep south! I didn't know some apples were self fruitful. Looks like I have a tree with all the characteristics of Granny Smith, and better. Harvestman, I've never seen a Granny growing down here, but I've seen them in local nurseries for sale. Mr Baby, thanx for the heads-up on this tree, looks to be perfect for my little tiny orchard!

I am well aware of what modern day experts recommend. I disagree. I have experimented for 40 years on every kind of tree in my yard. An open wound, like all unsealed drying wood, cracks. Water enters the cracks along with debris and causes rot. Bugs find the moist rotting environment enjoyable and take up residence. Next thing you know you have one of those trees that are all hollow in the heart. The experts say the tree shuts the wound off and everything's Ok. Well if you don't care how long the tree's life span is and it just has to live as long as you do, Ok, otherwise, it's crap! Just like collar cuts. Under the right conditions, with a branch at a good horizontal angle, they're great, but not every situation is ideal and when you have three or four branches intersecting a crotch to remove it's going to take close cuts and sculpting with chisels to get cuts that will drain and heal and not rot. Keep in mind, these new methods are designed for todays professionals who must temper perfection with time is money. Sterilization takes time. Reworking the cut with hand tools takes time. Periodically inspecting and renovating the wound takes time. Properly treating the wound takes time and an improperly dressed wound is worse than no dressing at all. If you can come up with a reasonable compromise then you have saved a lot of time, therefore, money. None of this applies to the home orchardist. He can do a little at a time and do it right. Remember, these same experts are the ones who prune maples in March along our highways and byways, instead of waiting until just after bud break which would promote an almost immediate callus to form, and no bleeding. Lastly, fruit trees seem to be about the slowest to heal and the most prone to fungal diseases, so any precaution, no matter how time consuming is warranted. Methods like clean, close cut and wound dressing were developed over thousands of years by the people who developed most of our fruit and nut cultivars from wild, inedible plants, the Chinese and the Italians. Even if my own experiments hadn't convinced me, I'd still ere in favor of the ancients!

Kskaren-- Congratulations on your daughter's wedding! I think you have 2 issues here---one is you want lots of beautiful hostas in a shady yard, and the other is you have a garden wedding coming up. Let the hostas go for a while -- maybe buy a few that are going to take several years to grow into maturity (at soonest) but concentrate on making the garden gorgeous for The Day. After the wedding you can work on building your hosta collection. That is going to take annuals, mostly, for the Wow. The guests absolutely will not know or care what you plant in there as long as it is not poison ivy. Impatiens will spend the summer getting spread out & lovely by fall, and by Sept you can also get pots of mums at your local big box place and plug them in anywhere you want a spot of color. Put them into pots, too, for height. You would view them more as wedding decorations than as part of the permanent ladnscaping. You can stick potted mums in the darkest part of the garden for a day or two, and they will not care, even though they are sun-lovers. If you can, get loads of them and "store" them in the yard of a friend who has sun. Then pick them up a day or two before the wedding. Then you won't need to fret about whether you'll find the colors and quantities you want on short notice. You can get them in colors that will complement the bridal party's clothes --- lavender, soft yellow, deep gold, pink, bronze -- there will be something in the colors of mums that will work with your bride's colors. You can get deep violet asters, too -- more sun lovers but who will care. After the wedding, take them to the local nursing home, etc if your yard is so dark they will die. And give some to the friend who babysat them for you! You can plant variegated liriope, too. They might be blooming in Sept where you live (liriope's season spreads over quite a few weeks, and there are a number of cultivars). They are very drought and shade tolerant and while they are boring in masses, they brighten up a dark spot very well when spotted here & there. I have them in my shady garden's shadier spots. They don't care much about tree roots, either. Best wishes on the whole event, and relax! (lol) Been there, done it.