First of all a little background. I am a graduate of Cal poly Pomona, I am a licensed irrigator in California and Texas. I also own a tree farm in Texas . White Hall Trees. In texas we do not have gray clay we have black clay that is at least as bad as what we had as a kid in California( I grew up in Orange County) Now with that said. The problem that everyone seems to have is the same. You claim you cant get fruit trees to grow in clay. Being a Civil Engineer, Landscape contractor and LI for 30 years I have some basic recommendations. First Clay is an excellent way to hold water ! and fruit trees need water! But not so much as to be wet all the time. First raise the tree about 3" above existing grade. When planting dig the hole twice as big around as the pot and 3 inches shallower than the pot . When back filling around the pot use a 3/4 to 1/4 ratio of good composted material to the clay and Float the tree back in. Simply put add water to the soil to get out air. Then ad 3" of good hardwood mulch around the tree. The biggest problem that you have is water so call Ewing Irrigation or John Deere landscapes and get some Rainbird .26 Drip tubing on 12" centers and drip the trees! If you circle the tree with lets say 6 drip emitters and water for 10 minutes you water .26 gal of water. Lets say the tree needs 3 Gal of water per week in one hour you will water 1.56 gal of water. So water 2 hours per week ! You may need to water Tuesday and Friday for 1 hour each day and check the tree hole with a moisture probe you can buy at one of the local Home depots for about $ 10.00 The biggest deal is don't guess ! Test and check ! Make sure. If you need more than 3 gal of water per week they have drip tube in .26, .4,.6, and .9 Netafim, Rainbird, Hunter, and Landscape products all make drip tube ! Do the calculations and if you are unsure call an irrigation professional they can help. The guys at Ewing can also help if you ask and by the way if you bring donuts to them they even get nicer !!!!!!!!!!!! Try It !

Fruitnut, I have 2 methods and I'm sharing my trade secrets here (what the hell- I'm 6 months from 60 and hope to retire in 25 years anyway). I start some plants straight in the ground, planting them way too close in a fenced off area. Planting them close makes maintenance per plant much less expensive given that it's all done by hand (don't ask). For apples in my climate it takes about 3 years to size them up to about 1.5" diameter- at least when planted this close. I carefully dig up these BR and put them in short 20 gallon pots (wide and shallow) in a mix of 1 part peat, 1 composted wood chips or stable waste ( almost pure humus with some carbo lumps) and 1 sand, plus a little wood ash. They limp the first season but I sell them the next for around $180 per. At this point they are bearing, 12' tall and well branched and the foliage is back to mormal. Other trees I transfer to Carl Whitcomb grow bags in real soil and let them grow about another 3 years and sell them for $250 per, or less to contractors. The grow bags I use are his last edition because they allow more root out of the bag and I can grow them without any irrigation at all- even through drought. Irrigation would reduce production by about a year, I'm sure, but in my operation only my potted plants get any and they are set in the soil as well. I always take some trees in the grow bags, remove the bags and put them into 25 Gallon pots with the soil intact but surrounded by my potting mix which allows me to sell some larger trees during the growing season. Surprisingly the soil surrounded by potting mix works very well and you might want to try that method for your trees as the soil gives you much more bang per square inch and costs less. Repotting would require only replacing the artificial soil on the edge of the soil ball. It makes things real heavy though, and my soil is not too fine so I don't know how it would work with a more clay soil but I bet it would work just fine. I'm sure my prices seem outrageous by your regional standards but I'm less than an hour from NYC and here it's more than competitive- it's the best deal around- because I have scores of varieties and they're actually properly shaped for fruit production. They also plug in better than the competitions BB'd trees, especially the ones I have in pots.

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.

Well it might be an age old debate about : To prune or Not to Prune. Home gardeners seem to draw many theories from their own experience, from what their grandfather told them and what their neighbor is telling them. I think in general, this kind of things expands the body of our knowledge and in the long run we all benefit from doing things by THINKING & REASONING rather than depending on "WHATEVER WILL BE, WILL BE... " So here I am with my book of philosophy about pruning tomatoes. An analogy that I find is pruning grape vines. I wonder why those vine growers and wine makers do that? Shouldn't more vines produce more grapes? About the nature of Tomato planst: It seems that they don't believe in "Planned Parenthood". They have a very greedy nature to keep on keeping on to grow branches, flower clusters and green tomatoes and more laterals up until the normal frost date. Somehow, in their system, there is no such a thing as ; There is a season that will end. Probably because they came originally from somewhere that there was no such a thing as FROST. So, as a gardener , I have to interfere and draw the lines, make rules : "Thou Shall not Have More Children Than You Can Support!." I have an ego, you know ! I want to be the master of my own destiny and even that of the tomato plant. I don't want to end up with buckets full of green tomatoes when the cold winds blow and the birds migrate and go, even the crow...How much green tomato does a man (or woman) need for pickling and frying? This post was edited by seysonn on Sat, Jun 8, 13 at 8:39