Personally I go "open center" with mine for purposes of light penetration and air circulation and head them off at roughly 8'. If you haven't pruned them at all I would start with height control and then move on to clearing the centers and crisscrossing branches and so on.

Sorry about that. I used the wrong code for posting images. Here's the post again Hi everyone. I planted this July-Elberta peach tree sometime in mid-may. It was a bare root fruit tree. The branches never came out from the trunk because the buds were dead, however, on the very top of the tree, branches did start growing. Anyways, I believe this tree is 2-3 years old, however its only been about 4 months or so since its been planted. From where the there is growth, there seems to be one main branch and right where the main branch is coming out of, there are 2-3 more branches. The main branch is giving off plenty of secondary branches And there are also many branches coming off of the other two branches I mentioned earlier: And all the secondary branches are growing in together and criss-crossing and what not like so: How can I go about doing this? My thoughts are two cut off the secondary branches that are growing inwards and are criss-crossing with other inward growing branches. However, as for the brances growing outward from the main branches, I will just leave them alone. Will this help in whatever growing season is left for the peach tree? Thank you!

Hi, Atheen. Got your message a few days ago, but often have trouble keeping up with mail from Houzz. Tim was referring to directional pruning. This pruning cut will produce a branch that grows to the right. If the cut was lower, a branch would occur in the axil (crotch) of the next lower leaf and grow left. If higher, above the highest leaf shown, it would yield a branch that grows away from the view point and to the left. I think I'd tend to do the pruning in 2 stages. The trees are really lanky, and you want foliage close to the trunk. It's best for the tree if you 'chase' the foliage back to the trunk in stages, rather than simply pruning the tree hard and hope it back-buds. I'd tip prune it a week or so before moving it outdoors. The pruning, along with added photo load and air movement will force back-budding that should offer a lot of good pruning opportunities. Once you see the new branches erupting, you can prune back to just above those branches. In 2D, it appears that you have about 5 branches growing from very close to the same spot on the smaller tree. This is going to cause a lot of thickening in that part of the tree. If what the picture shows is how things really are, you should think about removing a couple of branches from that area to prevent the unsightly thickening common to citrus with that branching issue. Once the new branches start grow, you'll have a lot of pruning opportunities. If you tell yourself that your focus needs to be on getting the tree whipped back into shape, you won't wimp out on the pruning. ;-) Al

Thanks meilkeeatplants! I don’t sell any fruits. I shared the fruits with a couple renters on the property last year. They didn’t mind the spots on the apples. I had thousands of pears but I didn’t get any. not even one, not sure what kind of animals got them. It would be nice if I could bring spotless apples to work and share with the city folks, I know they won’t like the spots.......