Not so sure he is against hand pruners, but you arent going to be able to prune some wood that needs to go with only hand pruners unless you are the Incredible Hulk. The trend in pruning has definitely gone towards overall tree renewal on trees with dwarf and semi-dwarf rootstock on a roughly 3-4 year schedule. Maybe not the approach you want to take if you want a pretty looking tree, but generally produces the most apples per tree.

TurCre, read rule #3.

Even on free standing root stocks spur renewal with a lot of crop on 2-year wood has been the norm for years (probably decades). For some varieties almost all the crop is derived from 2 year wood as is the case with Macoun. Even Macintosh has best flowers on 2nd year wood of moderately vigorous shoots.

Yet the literature is traditionally full of guidance that suggests getting most of the crop from long lived spur wood. It is the precious "conventional wisdom".

I've watched a bunch of the uMass fruit advisor videos. They seem to be aimed at commercial growers with mass expectations of fruit, quite a bit different than the backyard orchard culture style that I'm shooting for. I'm sure the system does exactly what a commercial grower wants it to do but the final product is different than what I want.

Hman, You might remember last year I posted a thread about loppers and you recommended Bahco. But then Bahco changed their minimum order to 5 loppers so I bought a Corona. I've been very pleased with the Corona and want to thank Bahco for losing the sale and steering me to Corona.

Rayrose, that was only from a source that was selling at very low prices, and only the long handled model that had that restriction. I believe it is available from many other sources, but at a higher price.

It has been a while since I've done lopper comparisons when I found Bahco far superior to the competition, but the pros around here still mostly use Bahco and I never, ever see them with Coronas, although we all do some shopping at the big boxes. Still, since I haven't tried them lately, I can't say for sure how they perform these days.

If you only have a single small orchard you are pruning it doesn't make much difference anyway, as long as you get a decent quality bypass lopper.

Thanks for the post and associated kinks H man it is good for me to review this stuff every year. You post also reminded to get off my butt and sharpen all of the pruning implements.

As far as hand pruners, to me it comes own to which tool fits the cut the best and does the least collateral damage in the process.

I like this link especially for two points he makes- the first I already mentioned- the second is that only 3 branches are usually needed for the first tier.

I have long known this but in an effort to have nursery trees fill out in the fastest possible time I've often waited too long to select permanent scaffolds (you needn't remove the temporaries before trees are bearing, just make sure you cut them out of the way)

Now at some sites I have trees with 4 scaffolds at the base that are "perfectly" distributed so if I remove one it will appear as though an entire side of the tree is naked. This is a real problem with vigorous varieties that need a lot of room to get productivity out of secondary wood.

Hman! What a great link (I also appreciated the 'home orchard' link to pruning), the info is excellent and so understandable. Don't know what I'd do without my loppers and 'little giant' ladder, hand clippers too. Time to start pruning is right! thanks so much, Mrs. G