Most people including myself do not have a lot of tree's to prune. I only have 2 peach tree,s to worry about, my other tree's are already shaped and do not need heavy pruning any more.I do have a few late freeze's in my area. I do prune my peach tree's the open center and shape them for a lot of sun penetration when they are young. When i buy a peach i usely cut the tree down to about 32 inches and then pick-out the new laterals branches.I descard all the flowers the first 2-3 years and continue shaping and cleaning the tree of small branches,tipping-off strong growing shoots during spring and summer. Then in the spring i usely wait till the last frost that(27 degrees and lower)to do the final pruning.When you have a lot of tree's to take care-off you might do it differently.I have other fruit tree,s to fall back on mostly no spray tree's like persimmon,paw-paw, citrus,asian pear and a few others. I believe in edible lanscaping so my tree,s has to look good too. I am working on a 10 year project to get my 21/2 acres out of 5acres in shape and this is on a slope. 3 more years then i am done.(hopefully)

Appleseed, You are correct, we do have pretty heavy clay based soil here. You don't have to dig very far to get to pure clay. That said, the top 12" of soil has a lot of organic matter (around 6%) but the soil in general gets very saturated w/ water because of the clay subsoil. Really a very poorly drained soil overall. Obtaining enough wood chips has always been a problem. In a good year I can get about 60 loads. This year I've been able to obtain about 70 dump truck loads, so it's been a good year. One company needed to get rid of about 60 loads, so that helped a lot. I've had fairly poor luck getting mulch from the big companies who do tree trimming for utilities, like Asplundh and Wright. Around here, they seem to have their usual places to dump and don't like to deviate. I've not paid for mulch yet, and I doubt I will. If I were to have to pay for mulch, I think I'd just go ahead and skip it. It costs quite a bit to spread it anyway. To pay for it, would make it cost prohibitive. I spread the mulch using rented equip., or I just hire someone with a skid steer to spread the mulch. I've done both, and it's about the same cost. The people who deliver the wood chips don't spread them. They just dump them wherever you tell them too. I used to own a road grader and spread some wood chips with that. That went real fast. I could spread a whole load in about one pass. I'd drive up over the top of the load and push it down the aisle spreading it as I went. In terms of labor, it's pretty much my son and I. We only have about 300 peach trees (plus some apples, plums, cherries) so we can fairly easily do it ourselves. I hope to avoid hiring a bunch of labor. I'm friends w/ another commercial peach grower and he has expanded to such a point he hires a lot of outside labor. He told me this summer, he sometimes wishes he was back to the same 100 peach trees he started out with, with just him and his wife. He said life was a lot simpler back then. I do have a tow behind (airblast sprayer). I think it would be very difficult to spray numerous trees without one. Basically, it would take me forever to spray 300+ trees with a wand. I spend a ton of time spraying the 50 fruit trees in my backyard with a wand sprayer. As it happens, I'm currently working on my airblast sprayer at the house now. One of the v-belt pulleys is worn out. The pulley takes 8 v-belts, but it burns up the belts pretty fast because the pulley is worn. I'm planning to convert it to a synchronous (geared) belt system. I've been on the phone all day working w/ a guy trying to design a geared belt system for this sprayer.

Everyone has different ideas on this. Me, I don't prune too much until they start to bear, but I do tie down limbs. For you though, I think you would like to remove those extra limbs. You probably want a nice looking tree in your yard or area and there is nothing wrong with that. I don't spray year old trees in my area, but I don't know where you are or what happens there. Glowingstar is a nice peach.

Hi, I start my first copper spray for plc around Thanksgiving. Most of the leaves are gone by then. (they are dropped). You want to spray the pruned limbs not this years leaves. Mrs. G