Well, to return to the original question-"Should I try to have them grow like a peach tree with 3 or 4 main branches? Or do I need to do something different?"- I'd say do something different. Open center pruning was a response to brown rot on peaches in the south- it let sunlight and air circulation reduce the humidity that ruined the crop. The only reason I can think of to do it with apples pears and plums is that you don't like ladders. Modified leader is really multiple leader- you let two or three scaffolds turn upward and compete with the central leader. Eventually, you top them all off. There's more pruning of crossing branches than with with central leader, but you'll get more production out of apricots and plums with the additional branching, and pears just have a natural tendency to grow this way. Bart, you said "some (especially some apples) have 4 or 5 branches radiating out of the trunk on a few different levels so there may be nearly 20 branches spaced in 18" of vertical trunk." I'd take most of those off. Even if you later cut out the leader, you'll want at least 6" between each branch. And you'll eventually cut off everything below 3 or 4'.

Craig, Posting pictures here is pretty easy. I've posted instructions in this forum many many times, but will do it again in hopes it will help. One of the easiest ways to provide your photo to be embedded into a post is to upload it onto an image hosting site such as Photobucket, Flickr, etc. That should be pretty straight forward, and the individual sites will give instructions on how to get your photos uploaded to their site when you sign up. Once your picture has been uploaded, find its web address by right clicking on the image and copying the image location. Some sites may even provide the address in a text box below the photo for your convenience. Let's say, as an example, that the address of the picture you want to post is http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg To embed the picture into a post, use the command img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg"> For larger pictures, it would be very very very helpful to add a width attribute. Do do so, just add width=600 after the second quotation mark. 600 is a reasonable width for Gardenweb forums and won't mess up the formatting of your post causing people to have to pan around to read the text. So, for larger pictures, the command above could be rewritten as: img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg" width=600> Note that I had to use special characters to get the commands above to show up here without turning into pictures, but you can use them as shown (with the correct image location, of course).

Fish fert is mostly for N and N is to induce greater vigor. When trees are small, I like to get them to size as quickly as possible but once they are bearing meaningful fruit I am careful to not overstimulate vegetative growth with excessive N- damaging fruit quality and making trees and fruit more susceptible to pest problems. Fall fertilization is not dangerous and is actually helpful to get N to the buds before mid spring and get growth to most vigorous start. It is late summer N that can sometimes postpone dormancy and hardening off that protects trees from winter damage. This danger is highly exagerated in the literature in my opinion as you get exactly the same results here when we have early summer drought and then soaking rain in mid-august. Some trees do get a late surge of vigorous growth which itself can suffer winter kill but by my observation the rest of the tree does fine. I'd be curious of the observations of others on this point. This is one of many observations I've made over the years that makes me ever vigilant to expert BS even as I continue to go to pedigreed experts for certain kinds of advice. Speaking of the advice of pedigreed experts, Cornell recommends a general application of 2 pounds N per 1,000 sq ft annually for general orchard maintenance if you are not doing a soil and tissue analysis kind of program.

Apparently kimmsr hasn't learned to comprehend what he reads. If he can find one quote from moi that says I don't believe spontaneous combustion can happen, I'll buy him and his family a steak dinner. Your problem kimmsr is that you post stuff that is outright wrong or made up and you often attribute it to other organizations. When asked for the links you usually state you can't find them, the links no longer exist or there is some new research available. Maybe you should contact the U of Mn to tell them of all your vast knowledge of documented small compost pile fires, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear from you. lol. While you're talking to them, make sure you educate them on your made up fact that the size of the pile has nothing to do with spontaneous combustion. Lloyd P.S. By the way, how much real rubber is in a tire? (snort) P.P.S. Sorry to OP for hijacking the thread but sometimes incredible inaccuracies ought to be challenged.