I looked at my Flavor Delight today and saw the fruit buds growing - only on last year’s wood. And the last year’s wood was only growing at the very top of the tree - which wants to be about 90 feet tall, higher than I can easily reach.
How can I encourage new fruiting wood to grow further down this summer? Notching?
Flavor Delight should have flower buds on the spurs on older wood. Older wood would be lower wood. It would be very unusual to only have flowers on last yr’s wood.
The way to get lower fruiting wood is to do major renewal pruning. Cut the tree way back.
My harglows have plenty of buds on the lower spurs, but the FD has none
Last year, a freeze got most of the fruit, so it ought to be fruiting heavily now.
I’ll see what branches aren’t fruiting and take the saw to them
If the spurs quit growing they don’t flower after that point. Apricots spurs do that, stop growing and then no more flowers. The cure is new wood. Cut out the old wood with dead spurs.
Most of the spurs aren’t dead, there are leaf buds
But I can see that to get fruit low, I’ll have to cut lower