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| What you need: Fruit trees can be trained to many forms. The most common are the open vase shape and central leader. This tutorial demonstrates how to train a young tree to an open vase shape, a form particularly suited to peaches, plums and apricots. |
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| Young trees are often purchased bareroot in winter as one-year-olds with a single trunk and no branches (whips), or as older trees that already have some branching (feathered). The tree in this picture is a whip. After planting, prune the whip back to 2 – 3 ft. from the ground above a healthy bud scale. |
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| The first dormant season after planting, our tree looks like this. Select 4 or 5 strong side branches that are evenly distributed around the trunk about 8 in. apart, with the lowest about 18 in. from the ground. These will be your future scaffold limbs. Avoid branches with narrow crotches. |
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| Prune back each scaffold by about . Prune the top of the tree back to just above the top scaffold. Remove any other larger branches that were not chosen as scaffolds. |
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| This is how our tree looked following pruning in the first dormant season. |
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| By the second dormant season, your tree will have grown significantly. Select 4 or 5 well-placed branches that grew from each of the scaffold limbs. |
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| Shorten these by about above an outward facing bud. Remove all other large shoots and vigorous vertical growth. |
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| This is how the tree looks following pruning in the second season. Over succeeding dormant seasons, head back vigorous shoots by about to , remove all vertical growth, remove dead or damaged growth and prune out growth heading into and crowding the center of the tree or rubbing against other branches. |
