As a permaculture farmer, I thought it would be fairly simple to grow a food forest, and get tasty juicy and organic fruits to eat every season. For many years I waited for the trees to grow big and start fruiting. However, this season I learnt a big lesson in fruit growing.
We planted our peach trees in July 2011. Finally, in 2015 we got a decent crop of juicy red peaches. Having seen the success of 2015, we waited for 2016, but had a very poor, almost failed crop. In 2017, we got good flowering and fruit setting, but the fruit was tiny and refused to grow, prompting the realisation that the trees had never been pruned.
If you have poor quality fruit on your overgrown peach tree, you can salvage the situation by: pruning away branches not bearing fruit to let in sunshine and air, fertilising the tree well with liquid fertiliser like jeevamrut, and watering the trees well in the hot summer since fruit is mostly water.
Looking ahead, the key learning was that fruits like peaches, guavas, pears, apples, plums and pomegranates grow on new wood - branches grown in the past year - while fruits like mangoes, sapota and litchis grow on old wood. Since peaches fruit on new wood, an unpruned tree will keep growing taller with fruit produced only at the very top, consuming nutrients into foliage rather than fruit.
Since the tree had not been pruned for 6 years, what was needed was not pruning but rejuvenation - cutting the tree back almost to its stumps during the monsoon so new branches emerge, to then be pruned in October ahead of the fruiting season. The shape aimed for is a vase, with 5-6 scaffolds on all sides and an empty middle, with all cuts made at an incline so water drips off, and cow dung applied as a balm to the wounds.
