Did a teacher ever tell you wrong? Have you figured out all the mistakes your teachers made? My favorite was my fifth grade teacher, a lady I actually argued with one day. She told us that if we ate the same thing every day we would get tired of it. I spoke up and told her that I would never get tired of hamburgers, and that ticked her off a little bit. I look at the overweight people in the various burger shops and think of her once in a while. Millions of obese Americans prove that gal wrong every day.
The picture is a nice black walnut we are growing. They will teach you in forestry schools that when you have multiple stems you should cut off the smaller one if there is a U transition. If it's a V you should leave it alone. I still hear that being given as advice. You can see above that I cut two sprouts off the base of the dominant walnut. One wound sprouted back and is making an unmerchantable stem, but it did heal over the wound. The wound closer to the main stem did not heal over; it barely has a callous ridge around it twenty years after I made those cuts. The open wound allowed rot to enter, so the stump has decay; we just don't know how much. My advice, from experience, is to leave these extra stems alone, unless you can catch them when they are just an inch or two in diameter. We don't prune off limbs after they reach two inches on timber trees, and I now apply that standard to multiple stems. Here's a big clue that tells you what I should have figured out sooner. When we prune live limbs off the trunk of a tree we leave the callous ridge at the base of the limb. That is fast growing tissue, and it allows the tree to close the wound quickly. There is no such ridge at the base of a sprout growing from the stump. It might heal, it might not. There is no need to take that risk.
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