Question on seedling

[jcguarneri]

Bending branches down promotes fruiting, but why?

Early on when I was trying to understand pruning and training trees I got the idea that branches should angle up from the trunk, never to point down. But now I understand that as you train them to an angle lower than horizontal they come into bearing sooner. But why? That is, what is the mechanism? I assume that it has something to do with hormone flow and nutrient supply, but just what is going on? Thanks.

Bark Inversion

Has anyone tried bark inversion? I have successfully used it on citruses. It can control the growth of citruses without pruning and it induces early blooming for citruses grown from seeds. The major advantage is that the tree size doesn’t grow vigorously and so you don’t need to prune for about 4 years and then you do light trimming and another bark inversion again. You do this when you want to maintain the size of the tree, citruses specially because if you prune citruses, especially snippin…

Want early fruit? Do the girdle

I came across this little article from the Iowa State Horticultural Society for 1880 (i love reading this type of stuff…) Sangamon Co I believe is in Illinois. I have a lot of apple seedlings that may be donors for this treatment… [quote] GIRDLING FOR FRUIT. I have often thought how pleasant it would be to me to visit my old agricultural and horticultural friends in this State, and look over their homes and farms and households, could I spare the time and means. I have recently indulged in …

Other tree training techniques: spreading, bending, notching, girdling, etc

There’s a lot of emphasis placed on making major pruning cuts when the trees are dormant and then very little said about summer pruning, limb bending, notching, etc. It’s hard to find consistent information on some of these techniques so I wanted to put them all down here and maybe get a discussion going on peoples experience with them. I will update this post periodically as I experiment with some of these techniques and observe their results. Summer pruning Used to control the size of a tree…