One caveat on peach trees in particular is they have a harder time pushing new buds on larger stocks. I have lost a couple peach trees I lopped at 15". I would first look for clear marks of buds on the main stem before lopping off; if the tree is a 2-year tree it will have plenty of those and you should be fine. If it is an older tree you may want to leave some of the branches. Note that this is only an issue on a freshly planted tree, the combination of just being transplanted and needing to push new buds is the problem. Also it is only a problem on peaches. I have many rows of 3' or 4' spaced trees, its my favorite fruit growing arrangement. I see you are in zone 6b so you are probably in the midwest or east where it is more humid. In those environments you need to do a lot more thinning than the California-centric DWN backyard orchard culture method will give you; if you don't you will get significant disease problems. I know because I spent several years fighting various disease problems that could have been avoided had I known how to prune properly. Basically what this means is to keep plenty of spacing between the various branches. A very rough guide is that a 1" diameter branch should be about 2' from the nearest 1"-er, a 1/2"er should be at least 1' away, etc. If there is too much density you just pick one of the two that are competing for the same space and remove it. It doesn't matter if it is from the same or a different tree, the same principle applies. Scott

Well I'll try and see. What you are saying glib does seem logical but in real life things sometimes work differently. Our soil is sand - and I don't mean sandy, it's just pure sand. In summer it dries almost instantly. So if a tree is far from other trees the soil around it always dries faster. But the soil of trees that are close together always stays moist even when the temp is in triple digits. So trees spaced farther apart are using up more resources like water and fertilizer ( we need to water our plants regularly otherwise they will all die cuz a few days without water and the soil is totally dry and the trees show heat stress, and we need to apply fertilizer more often because it just washes away). We have some shade trees that are planted pretty close together and they are thriving, they have grown over 10 feet in less than 2 years. We have to constantly prune them to keep them in control. I just hope that the fruit trees would show te same behavior.

In the 1800s the method of spraying a bordeaux mixture with lead arsenate mixed in gained popularity. By the early 1900s it was standard practice. The pesticide was applied with a 50 gallon oak barrel and a and pump or some sort of pump attached to the top. Men would ride a wagon down the rows spraying with wands attached to hoses (natural rubber?). From the illustrations I have seen they didn't wear any masks either! The "good old days" were not what we really think they were. Apples at the grocer's in the 1800s were covered with poison worse then what we have now. I just found one of these old orchard barrels for sale at a blacksmith shop. The inside is coated with what looks like old white lead paint - crusty of coarse! I've attached a link which made me cringe - it talks about how much fun the children had measuring out the lead arsenate to help Dad in the orchard. Here is a link that might be useful: lead arsenate

First of all, ammonia would increase your pH, an ammonia salt would reduce your pH. The difference is that an ammonia salt contains the ammonium ion NH4(+) which is acidic while aqueous ammonia is just NH3 (which is a base) dissolved in water. Anyway, adding ammonia or ammonium to a nutrient solution to change pH levels is a very bad thing to do. Plants absorb nitrogen as ammonium very rapidly and this causes a very severe toxicity. Never add ammonium to your nutrient solution at levels above 30 ppm. I wrote an article about the different forms of nitrogen plants take, so you can check it out and see the effects ammonium has on plants http://allhydroponics.blogspot.com/2009/02/nitrogen-fertilization-in-hydroponics.html By the way, thank you for the reference freemangreens ! Here is a link that might be useful: Everything Hydroponics