Training newly grafted apple trees
Most
folks will tell you to leave a grafted apple alone for its first year
of life. The goal is for it to grow straight and tall, into a
one-year-old whip that is hopefully four feet tall (for an apple on MM111).
That makes a lot of sense if you want a tree to achieve its full height potential, but what if you plan to use high-density methods to fit more apples into a smaller space? As our grafted trees
surpassed waist height, it occurred to me that if I want branching to
begin relatively close to the ground, I might as well break the apical
dominance now rather than waiting until this winter to begin
pruning. The photo to the left shows what happens a couple of
weeks after snipping the top off one of the whips --- new branches begin
to form in the leaf axils of the top three leaves or so.
What next? The
photos above show an apple on MM111 rootstock that is several years
older, and also several weeks further along in its top-snipping
adventure. As you can see, I've tied down all but one of the new
branches so the tree will once again enjoy apical dominance while
turning the horizontal twigs into scaffolds. On a vigorous tree
like this one, I've managed to snip the top off the tree twice this year
(if I recall correctly), building two whorls of scaffolds in one
summer.
I doubt our little
grafted trees will put out much more growth this summer, but hopefully
they'll sink at least a little energy into the new branches. If
all goes as planned, when I transplant them to their new homes this
winter, they'll be a bit further along than the typical one-year-old
whip.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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