Note: I am the originator of this post and a self-taught gardener! From my understanding, it's a great thing to have an established v-shape already, so YAY on your pickens! I would start by pruning for the three D's - dead, damaged or diseased. Also, the smaller branches I would completely cut back 10-20'' from the ground. Also, be very cautious about when you prune in the spring. This past year, I pruned around my usual April 1st timeframe, and then we got hit with an untimely and detrimental frost that messed the entire growing season for so many plants. I'm in New Haven, Connecticut for reference. My peach tree got inflicted with a serious case of leaf curl and I thought it would die! I saved it by making a homemade anti-fungal solution of water and oregano oil. I also gave it one dowse of a water and beach solution as a Hail Mary since the harvest for the year was shot. All these leaves had turned brown and fell off. Then, the tree came back with a fury, more than I could've imagined, and made a full recovery sprouting new leaves everywhere. :) Next year when I prune, I will be dowsing the tree in my homemade oregano oil solution to hold back the spores that come with the spring season and could possibly reestablish a fresh case of leaf curl. It's good to do this as a preventive since they are so susceptible to the disease. I've read to remove and burn old leaves, but I haven't done this and am going to see how the solution helps alone. If it's helpful, I'm also going to try this method on my peonies that caught leaf blotch this year, too.

I live in Florida for about 10 years, and in all this time that I have been gardening here and visiting other gardens in different areas, I never seen anyone growing successful apples, regular pears or apricots. In Phoenix I grew a very fruitful apples and apricots, the Ana apples were not of a good eating quality like different varieties in other states but they were good for cooking with them. The apricots were the best that I have ever eaten. There is maybe somebody growing them that I don't know about them, but maybe some pictures will make me a believer.:) I planted apples and regular pears, the apples were of such small size and no way to compare with other apples from other states, when I went to Monticello and sample the same apples, I took my trees down. The pears never produced fruit so I took them out. The u-pick farm near me has sand pears, they are okay but not my favorite.... The last try were the apricots and hybrids, never produced any fruit and they are out. The peaches are another story, we have so much in such a little time. My neighbor has 2 different UF peaches and cannot keep up with them, too much fruit, he told me that I can pick his fruit and I declined because I had too much fruit on my own. He does nothing for the tree besides the trimming, he told me he uses Jobe's spikes and that is all. The local farmers market which by the way is the biggest in the country, only carry local peaches, never apples, pears or apricots, those they come from California and other places, I am very good at reading labels and I try to support local farmers if I can.... I eat local and I am enjoying strawberries now, later I will go and pick the blueberries, we excel on the flavor of these fruits. Silvia

I will only tell you what we did with ours, here in Oklahoma. First of all the tree was overgrown... too tall for my liking since we have a very small back yard. I had read a book by Ann Ralph, "Grow a Little Fruit Tree". You can Google it if interested. She and several other Nursery people advocate summer pruning to control height. The idea is that if pruned at the summer solstice, about June 21, the tree has used up most of it's winter stores for strong growth. June is the time to prune for height and winter prune to take out all growth that is crowding the center. We now have a four year old peach that is 6' tall and loaded with fruit. It has 4 scaffold limbs that are maxed out at about knee height. If I were doing this again with a younger/smaller (5/8 caliper) tree I would take it down even lower so we could have more fruiting wood within that 6' to 7' height. Another thing to look at would be videos made by Dave Wilson Nursery on this subject. Google "backyard fruit". Hope this will give you some ideas to think about.

I noticed that too, but I didn’t really have a choice. They were the only branches available. The strongest branches with the most buds went straight as an arrow out the center of the tree, the ones I had to cut down.