Pruning and Training Young Vines
Grapes will grow on just about anything. In the wild, they climb large trees to get their leaves into the sun. But in home plantings, you need to rein in that vigor by pruning and training the plants to keep them manageable and productive. You can train grapes to grow on an existing arbor, fence, or other structure. If you are starting from scratch, a good trellising method is the four-arm Kniffin system see Figures 16 and 17 . No matter what system you use to support your vines, the principles...
Rootstocks
Most home gardeners prefer small, size-controlled fruit trees grown on dwarfing rootstocks. Smaller trees make picking, pruning, and pest control easier, and they set fruit at a younger age than full-sized trees. Rootstocks for apple trees are special apple varieties that control the height of the tree and give it other special characteristics, such as resistance to insects or diseases, solid anchorage in the ground, and early fruit production. A cultivar is grafted onto this special rootstock,...
Site Selection and Soil Preparation
Fruit plants are most productive if you carefully match them with the proper planting site. Very few sites are naturally ideal. To succeed, you may have to overcome some combination of weeds, diseases, pests, poor drainage, low soil organic matter, and poor soil fertility. Each of these can severely reduce the size of your harvest and the health of your plants. So it's best to take care of them before planting. Once plants are in the ground, it is very difficult to reduce soil pest populations...
Pruning and Training Basics
Apples, pears, cherries, and plums produce their best fruit on two- to three-year-old wood. Peaches bear their fruit on the last year's vegetative growth. One of the prime reasons for annual pruning is to encourage lots of productive fruiting wood one-year-old wood on peaches and two- to three-year-old wood on the others. Unpruned trees can quickly become unproductive, while 70-year-old fruit trees can still bear lots of fruit because annual pruning promotes the right amounts and kinds of...
Training and Pruning Young Apple and Pear Trees
Pruning is especially critical just after planting and during the first few years of growth to make sure that the overall structure of the fruit tree is correct and to encourage early fruiting. Pruning cuts on young trees stimulate vegetative growth below the cuts and delay fruit bearing. So keep the number of cuts made on a young tree to a minimum, making only cuts that are necessary for proper structural development. If you do a good job of pruning and develop a structurally strong tree with...
