Old apple tree

My new property has an old apple tree that hasn't been cared for. I cut off the dead main branch and cleared it out a little, but I know I need to do more.

It is currently dormant but does have buds. A good portion of the crown is apparently dead as well.

At this point would it be safe to give ot a radical haircut, or even to pollard it?

Yep. This is a great opportunity to rehabilitate the tree, which already has a nice grunty root system and will recover quickly from radical pruning. Decapitate that "mop top" and start over with an eye to structure. Lop it now at about waist height and let it put out a bunch of suckers. They will grow like mad over the coming months and you can just stand back and let them form a big green ball. Then, next winter, go in and thin that mess, leaving a handful of branches that will become the scaffold of the new tree. You might end up with 6-8 stems, and these can be stubbed back to about 50-80 cm so they don't present too much of a profile to the wind.

The following growing season you can be more hands-on. Encourage lateral branching with wide angles, good horizontal spread, and try to get some growth in all sectors of the developing crown without crossing or crowding. Keep the vertical growth to a minimum, pinching out or breaking off suckers while they are still soft.

By the third year, you should be rewarded with a decent flowering and fruit set, far beyond where you would be three years on from planting a new tree. At this point it's just standard maintenance and enjoying the apples.

Waist height would be about where the left facing "knob" is, below the level of the branches. That's where I cut off the dead branch.

This is from a different angle. If I'm understanding correctly, I would cut both branches about 2/3 of the way up and essentially pollard the tree.

Would it survive being cut back that far?

Maybe go a little lower then. Just the two trunks and possibly the stubs of the main branches coming off. Like this:



Apple trees are very resilient and I would be surprised if it didn't come back stronger in the long run.

[edit] One more thing you can do, and it sounds weird but is effective, is to gently scarify the bark in the area where you want new shoots to emerge. I like to use a wire brush for this. Don't scrape away or dig in too much...just scuff it up a bit to remove older dead material and the increased light levels will induce some of the latent buds under the surface to break dormancy.

:) My brain said "2/3 up the trunk" but I somehow failed to write the last two words.

Thanks for your help! If I remember,  I'll post more pictures after I give the tree it's haircut.

Good luck, Lauren...and be sure to post a photo of the growth around mid summer. I know it seems like a horrible thing to do to a tree (and someone else here obviously has pretty strong opinions about this) but I've seen the outcomes many times.

If you tried to thin out that existing crown and make some sense of it, the wind would end up twisting or breaking most of the remaining branches because they would no longer have the support and shelter of that tangle around them. More than once I've had to cut the crown off an otherwise perfectly good tree because the wind snapped it, or borer girdled it (or both). It doesn't kill the tree, and the end result is almost always better than what was there before. Be bold, angle the cuts so that they shed water, and put a nice dollop of clay and cow manure on them for protection.

That's one of the problems at this property--the wind is always blowing.

I know apples take well to pollarding, but I wasn't sure how much I could cut and have a chance of saving the tree. If I don't save the tree nothing is lost, because much of the crown is already dead and if I can't get some new growth it'll die entirely and be firewood in a few years.

Before your last comment, I was going to suggest asking someone from the plains.  If you're not worried, go for it.

I live west of where you are, and don't know if I lost apple trees in the past due to my haphazard pruning or spray from farmers.   I have some complete rat's nest trees that I leave alone because they are all I have.  The last thing I would worry about is the wind.  It has already survived that.

Cutting on trees is nerve-wracking when trees are so hard to establish.  But that might just be me.

Not  just you. I have several other mature trees that look fine. Any trimming will start next year, after I see how they grow and fruit. I don't think they really need my interference.

I figured since this one will die anyway without help I can't make it worse.

Howdy,

If this was a tree I was trying to save, I would prune so I could climb in the middle, removing tight branch growth. Remove dead wood.

The shaded interior doesn't need all that branch growth, open the inside up, climb up there so you can move around.  

Any or all branches that are growing downward, I would cut off and/or back to a good leader. I would cut or prune all branches that are crossing.

That might be all I do and wait and see what the new budding would be like.  

You can always cut more, as in pollarding....