Hi, new to the forum. I live out in roberts creek bc, and i've inherited a very old neglected garden. there are two apple trees in the back which produced apples when we first moved in. we pruned the trees (with the aid of instructions) two years ago, and since then, they have produced only about 5 apples each year. did i shock the trees? is there a way of promoting apple grown again?
I used to have a large, old apple tree that came with the property that I bought. I pruned it down to a reasonable size, but that induced a lot of suckers and reduced the amount of fruit drastically. I found that ring girdling the trunk below the lowest branches both reduced sucker growth and improved fruit production. I girdled the tree just after blossoming, making the girdle about 1/4" wide. You have to be careful to remove the bark and all of the cambium layer inside the girdled area, or the technique will not be effective. This causes no damage to the tree because the girdled area fills in with new cambium during the summer. It just reduces new growth above the girdle and increases production of blossom buds, similar to the effect of a dwarfing rootstock. If you are worried about damaging the tree, you can experiment with a girdle on one or two branches. That's what I did before I started girdling the whole trunk.
thanks, does this girdling work on other tree species to reduce water shoots? i have a magnolia grandiflora that was damaged in a storm and it has also gone top end crazy.
I've tried girdling on cherries, where it didn't seem very effective. The technique is used most commonly on grapes, where it is has the effect of increasing the size of seedless grapes. I've never tried it on a magnolia, but it wouldn't hurt to experiment with it.
Maybe you are cutting the fruiting branches off. Are you getting much blossom? Some times our weather here determines how much fruit we get apart from the parrots and possums http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1150.html Liz
Or it's an every-other-year variety. I discovered the Golden Delicious tree I inherited when we bought our house is like that. This year is an "on" year and we'll get bushels from one semi-dwarf tree. Last year we got five, count 'em, five apples. But I really suspect you may have pruned off the spurs that flower and later fruit. You can stimulate the production of new spurs by weighting a branch that naturally grows up so it is horizontal. I use bungee cords and water-filled plastic milk bottles as weights, but only add as much water to the bottle as is necessary to get the branch horizontal. If it's over-weighted I find the branches often break. Luckily I had lots of branches to try this on! keke
