After I got them I made pruning cuts and that is a post subject in and of itself! What does annual pruning do to a tree's form? You can look at a tree that has been consecutively pruned and see the effect of the yearly pruning on it's form. Pretty much the lower branching that these trees have is because they were pruned. It causes the branching to form lower then normal and can overall reduce the tree height.
You can see I just brought the height down about a foot and a half. I left the branches about 5 inches or so above the last years cut. I also cut a few branches off as this tree is getting pretty big, and some that were growing horizontally had to be removed.
Here is the shape of the apricot. It is a Blenheim apricot.
Here is the photo of the Burgundy plum. I think this is a before photo, and I would take off some of the tips that exceed the overall height just to shape this a little bit on the top. Here you get an overall picture of it's shape. It started out extremely vertical. I was concerned that the growth was so close together that I cut a couple of the interior braches which would open the center up. As the tree is maturing it is spreading on it's own and this is because of the weight of the fruit.
Each year it is getting easier and easier to prune the trees because the growth is not as robust as in previous years when they were new.
I will have to dig around and see if I can find pictures of the apricot tree when it was newly planted and post those photos to show it through the years until now. That should shed some light on the effects of annual pruning on the overall shape of a tree.
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