Does anyone have experience bending limbs with fruits like persimmons or pawpaws? Does it speed fruiting? I was going to bend some limbs on my largest tree to keep it manageable, curious if it will speed up fruiting since it hasn’t happened yet.
My experience with most stone fruit, persimmons, grapes, figs, and nut trees says that branch orientation will have little to no influence on flower bud formation and fruiting. My Eureka persimmon fruits at a young age with no pruning or training. Peaches, apricots, plums, pluots, and nectarines fruit fine on upright shoots. In fact those are the best shoots.
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I bend limbs on persimmons and stone fruits to keep the fruiting area lower. Also if the trees get too vigorous they will put out too many big vertical limbs which will not lead to an optimal fruiting surface - too much blind wood. I had lots of problems with this since I am keeping the trees small and they are full-sized stocks in many cases; bending solved the problem. I didn’t need to do this on all my persimmon and stone fruit trees, maybe half. Pawpaws I just let do their own thing, and I top them to keep from getting too tall.
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