Notch Above a Dormant Bud on a Braeburn Whip to Force a Lateral at 60 Centimetres

Sixty centimetres from the ground is where most fan and espalier framework wants its first lateral, and a maiden Braeburn whip almost never gives you a bud that breaks there on its own. The terminal bud floods the shoot with auxin that travels down and keeps every bud below it dormant. Cut the flow above one chosen bud and that bud loses the signal telling it to wait.

A notch is a shallow crescent removed from the bark and cambium roughly 3mm above the target bud, spanning about a third of the stem circumference. Made in late February on a dormant whip, before the buds swell, it interrupts the descending auxin just enough to release the bud directly beneath it. The bud pushes a lateral that same spring. Miss the timing and cut once the sap is running and you get bleeding, poor healing, and an unreliable break.

The cut itself, in millimetres

Use a clean, narrow blade. A Felco 6 or a grafting knife with a fresh edge gives you the control a bypass secateur cannot, because you are removing tissue, not severing a stem. The crescent should be about 6mm to 8mm deep along the bark, penetrating through the green cambium to the white wood beneath but no deeper. Take two angled cuts that meet, lift the sliver out, and leave a clean wound with no ragged bark tags.

Position matters more than depth. The notch sits above the bud you want to force, on the same side of the stem, so the interruption falls directly in the auxin path feeding that bud. A notch below a bud does the opposite: it starves the bud of nutrients moving up from the roots and weakens the break. Above releases, below suppresses. That asymmetry is the whole technique, and gardeners who notch on the wrong side get the reverse of what they wanted and blame the method.

For a lateral at 60cm, find the nearest healthy bud at or just under that height. Buds are not evenly spaced on a Braeburn whip, so you work with what the internodes give you. A bud at 58cm notched correctly beats a bud at 61cm left to chance.

Why Braeburn in particular resists

Braeburn is a tip-bearer leaning toward spur habit, and its maidens run strongly vertical with long clean internodes and stubborn apical dominance. Left alone, a first-year whip will extend a metre or more and set almost no laterals in the lower two thirds. That growth habit is exactly why the variety frustrates anyone trying to build a low framework without intervention.

Comparable notching on a Cox or a Discovery whip often needs less encouragement because those cultivars break more freely lower down. On Braeburn the notch is doing real work against a strong hormonal gradient, which is why the depth and the timing are not negotiable. A half-hearted score that only nicks the bark will not interrupt enough auxin, and the bud stays shut.

Rootstock changes the picture too. A Braeburn on M9 or M26 runs less vigorously than the same scion on MM106, so the auxin pressure differs and the response to a notch differs with it. On dwarfing stock the break tends to be tidier and easier to manage as future scaffold. On MM106 the forced lateral can itself grow away too strongly and need pinching back in July to keep it in proportion with the leader.

One line that matters

A notch that heals over cleanly by midsummer did its job; a notch still weeping in June was cut too late or too deep.

Summer follow-up on the forced lateral

Once your 60cm lateral has broken and extended through spring, the July and August work decides whether it becomes fruiting wood or just more vegetative growth. Summer pruning of apple laterals, cutting back the current season’s shoots to about three leaves above the basal cluster, redirects energy into spur formation and fruit bud initiation for the following year. This is the Modified Lorette approach that fan and espalier growers have used for over a century.

The timing runs off the wood, not the calendar. A lateral is ready for its summer cut when the shoot has gone woody at the base for roughly the bottom third and the leaves are dark and mature, typically mid to late August in a cool temperate climate. Cut too early and the lateral responds by pushing secondary growth from the buds you just exposed, which forces a second cut in September and drains the tree.

On a forced Braeburn lateral specifically, resist the urge to shorten it hard in its first summer. The break needs a full season of leaf to thicken and lay down the reserves that carry it through winter. Prune the sub-laterals coming off it, leave the main extension alone until the following dormant season, and only then set its length to fit the framework.

The bypass secateur earns its keep here. A Felco 2 or Felco 6 with a sharp blade makes the summer cut cleanly without crushing the shoot, and crushed tissue at a summer cut invites dieback in a way it rarely does in the cold of February. Wipe the blade between trees if canker or any bark lesion is present on the wood you are working through.

By the end of the second summer, a well handled forced lateral carries the beginnings of a spur system along its length and sits at the height you chose two seasons earlier. The framework you drew on paper starts to exist in wood, which is more than can be said for the whip that was left to break where it pleased.

When the bud does not break

Sometimes the notch heals and the bud below it stays shut anyway. The usual cause is a notch cut too shallow, one that scored the outer bark without reaching the cambium, so the auxin path was never actually interrupted. A notch that leaves the green layer intact does nothing. You can tell after the fact: a shallow notch heals almost invisibly by June, while a correctly depthed one leaves a clear crescent scar that stays visible for a season.

A second cause is a blind bud, one that was already dead or vestigial when you notched above it. Braeburn whips carry the occasional dud, and no amount of notching wakes a bud with no growing point inside. This is why you check the bud is plump and viable before committing the knife, and why some growers notch above two adjacent buds at slightly different heights to hedge against one being blind.

Recovery for next season is straightforward. If a viable bud failed to break because the notch was too light, re-notch the following February, this time cutting through to the white wood properly. The bud will usually respond the second year, having lost a season but not the position. That is the trade for working with living tissue instead of forcing it: it does not always cooperate on the first pass, and the whip has its own view of where it would rather grow.