Looming for advice on getting more blooms on my Spice Zee. Little background on the tree. It is going into its third leaf and on lovell. I have it growing in a pot due to my zone (5). I started training it like a typical open center and am beginning to rethink that. I see all these pictures of trees with tons of blooms, trees 1/4 the size of mine loaded, etc and I’m thinking it may be a pruning problem. Any help is greatly appreciated. Right now i currently only see 4-6 total flowers and a ton of purely vegetative wood.
In a pot any shape will work because of the small size. It will set fruit buds if you can slow down the growth. So don’t prune any more until it flowers. Then you can shape it up some to suit your needs.
I rarely ever prune my container trees… What i have done is cut them back to promote new growth… the key is to keep some fruiting wood for the following year, but get rid of enough to promote new growth too.
I’ll interested to see if my pluots start producing less flowers because the buds must be 4 years old now and most of the varieties have not seen much in the way of pruning.
The spurs eventually quit growing. That’s when they no longer set flower buds. So the fruiting wood moves up the tree. That’s when it’s time to cut back low for renewal wood.
Pluots seem to flower longer on the same spurs than apricot but not as long as sweet cherry.
1 Like
Took the above advice and did zero pruning on any of my container trees. … here’s what i got:
The Spice Zee went wild. I looked over the tree before i posted again and again. Only a handful of buds looked different. Those were the ones i believed to be flower buds due to the tell tale "fat and rounded appearance ". The remainder had the thin elongated appearance indicative of leaf buds. Well looking at it now some of those seemed to have turned into flower buds. Not sure if i just couldn’t tell it or what. . But none the less I’m happy. Now just have to hand pollinate these flowers.
Question for all of you, it’s it normal to have these blooms staggered out so far? Had 2 flowers open 2-3weeks ago, 2 more open last week, now these. …
I don’t know about Spice Zee, but that’s what I observed happening on apple, blackberry, forsythia, and azalea this year that got enough growing degree hours and water to initiate blooms before they had sufficient chill hours. I think of it as cautious blooming, rather like sending the smallest person out to test the ice first. Then gradually letting others on.
1 Like