You want fruit...stop fooling with them twigs!

[krismoriah]

I like twigs (whips). I can prune and shape them to my liking better and with horizontal branch bending i can have fruit a little earlier on most of them. However i dont want 25 feet trees myself. So im ok fooling with them and 3-4 years is fair to me. Even though many fruit earlier. I have some in pots now waiting to be planted in the Fall that fruited this year.

This is all that i personally want or desire out of each tree… but i do understand that some want/need more.

Using Dave Wilson techniques to keep trees small

My trees are between 8 and ten years old. As I developed my orchard I added trees the first three years. These are only trees in the city. I have more than one orchard. So I wanted to keep them small. I never wanted full size trees. For years I wanted to grow fruit trees but it was impractical. Then I discovered you can keep trees small by pruning a few times a year. I decided to try it. As small fruit trees would be very doable for me. So do these techniques work? Judge for yourself Here is …

Drew also makes some points about fruit quality vs quantity etc.

Share your strategies to hasten fruiting

I have been scouring this forum and the internet for strategies to get my trees to fruit faster and I thought it would be great if we had a post that summarized all of the techniques that are scattered throughout our collective minds. Here are some of my notes, and as they say, the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to give the wrong answer, so here it goes : 1. Use a dwarfing and precocious rootstock. 2. Bend branches horizontal or more to encourage fruiting. 3. Short…