I HAVE --------------- Sinicuichi Young Acacia maidenii Young Desmanthus illinoensis Pereskiopsis spathulata Silene capensis Psychotria nervosa I WANT --------------- FRUITING PLANTS!!!!!!! for 8b.

Thanks for the advice. It is really frustrating to have a professional do something so drastic without consultation. It will take some time but I'll keep the outside trimmed back and hopefully the centre will develop. So, if I have one leader develop I've been told it is not good for the tree. Too much shade and too hard to get the fruit. However, shade is what I want and the fruit wasn't hard to get with a basket on a stick device. (yeah Lee Valley) But, if I let say four suckers develop I will have shade and just as much mass develop. Isn't that just as bad? It would at least look more natural. Thanks again. I do really appreciate the help. ..... CanuckOnFire

You do not need to be above the tree to prune. You could have a branch that is 10' tall and cut it at 4'. You certainly wouldn't need to get on a ladder to make the 4' cut just because the branch is 10'. All the trees you mention except for the cherry, which you will probably kill doing what you want because they don't handle constant or heavy pruning well (and it sounds like you are going to cut a large central leader to make an open vase, which is why my old cherry tree split about 15 years after I had that idea), and the guava (which I just don't know about) fruit on last year's wood. Once you get your basic tree structure down your pruning will be replacing old branches when they get too big and heading back new branches to encourage fruiting and strength. You can bend the branches down to do the heading back and the branch replacement will be done at whatever level you decide your fruiting branches will come from. That level could be radiating from a central leader or it could be a system of scaffolds. I see a lot of overgrown "new wood" fruit trees and the reason is people didn't train them with the idea of branch replacement and to continue getting fruit they need to let the tree continue to get larger and larger. Let's say you decide your base will be cut at 4' and you will allow the trees to go no more than 10'. If the trees grow 12" a year or you head them back so they grow no more than 12" a year that means you will be replacing branches every 6 years. I don't know about zone 9 but 6 years is not a unmanageable branch. If it is you could decide to replace every 4 or 5 year branch and have an 8'-9' tree. If you are really stuck on having your trees only be 6' (which like I said above, there is no pruning reason to have to have them at head height to prune them since you will be removing well below the final height and can bend whips down to head them back) you would be cutting them off after every 2nd year. I'm not sure your trees would go for that, they may decide they don't have enough tree compared to root to bother trying to populate and growing tree is more important. I have a McIntosh that hates being espaliered to 5' and it's always trying to grow more tree instead of getting heavy with fruit. You may have to do some root pruning to make them satisfied with 6' of tree or do some other stress/extra dwarfing techniques to cause them to bear heavy so they don't have the energy to make more tree.

Depending on where you are in Tampa you might have luck with Mango, Lychee, Sapodilla, or Sugar Apple. There are dwarf or "condo" versions of these trees that are ideal for smaller back yards and might allow you to plant more than one. Mango and lychee in particular are evergreen and add a great tropical look to the landscape. None of these are readily available in the supermarket (the fibrous things at the grocery called "mangos" are weak) so you'd be growing something that is unique and hard to find otherwise. Citrus is popular as well- you can get grafted trees now that have multiple types of fruit on one tree. Good luck!