Of all fruit-trees, pruning is most used with the peach in regulating
the development of the tree. In its early years, we may almost say
that the peach "lives by the knife." At all stages of growth the
vigorous use of the knife is indispensable in keeping the peach in
proper bounds, and yet, rather paradoxically, knife and saw must be
used sometime or other in the life of every peach-orchard to stimulate
growth or at least to force out new growths. Indispensable as a certain
amount of pruning is in training the peach, there is no question in
the minds of those who have studied the subject but that it is much
more often overdone than underdone. There are no fixed rules in pruning
peaches and to discuss in full the diverse theories and practices is
not within the range of this exposition. All that can be attempted is
briefly to set down what the present practices are in the State.
In transplanting, the peach suffers severe root-pruning, an operation
that it does not bear well. Thus deprived of its roots, the young tree
must have its top correspondingly diminished. Two practices are in
vogue in New York in this curtailment of the top as the trees go from
the nursery to the orchard. The most common practice is to cut the
young tree back to a whip and then shorten-in the whip. New branches
spring freely from this bare stub but these do not always come where
they are wanted and often the new wood comes only from the stock. These
objections to pruning to a whip have brought about a modification in
which the branches are cut back to stubs of two or three buds. In a
series of experiments now in progress on the Station grounds it seems
certain that the second method is better than the first.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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