Ring barking Apples and Pears

[NI Tree]

they also usa sinular method for vines by root pruning and reducsing watering to increase stress.

[RopeKnight]

Here are a few pics of a Norway Maple I ring barked last year with a crown clean/train and then again this year with the crown reduction and with many more ring barks. It works well to slow the growth about 1/2 the expected length of normal increments of growth.

[agg221]

Never heard of this before I've always been told to thin centre out and try and leave horizontal branches as they produce the most fruit?

 

Pruning fruit trees is actually quite a subtle balance. Your approach would be normal practice, but the reasons are quite varied.

 

Fruit trees, particularly apples and pears, are deliberately grafted onto stock to control their size. By comparison with 'normal' trees they are very small, and hence very weak-growing, vulnerable to disease and short-lived (modern commercial apple orchard ~20yrs).

 

The obvious reasons for pruning therefore combine removing dead, diseased and crossing (disease entry point) wood which the tree can't deal with, and getting light and air into the crown to stop mould damaging the fruit and allowing it to ripen. There is also, at least in the early stages, an element of creating a shape which allows the maximum volume of well spaced wood, to maximise yield.

 

The more subtle reasons are about maintaining a permanent state of maturity. Trees which are immature don't fruit. Producing lots of immature wood, as per pollarding, means no fruit buds. On the other hand, fruit trees on dwarfing stocks will pass rapidly from maturity to senility, which means weak growth, unable to produce good sized fruit, and susceptible to disease and hence death.

 

Consequently, you're looking to techniques which get the tree rapidly to maturity, and then keep it there indefinitely. These can include reducing apical dominance (hence pruning to low-angle branches), the more modern (as in 20th century rather than 19th century origin) pruning methods such as renewal pruning rather than spur pruning, and the use of ring-barking.

 

Pruning cut placement and timing can be used to increase or decrease vigour and hence maturity as required. Ring barking though is much more limited as it can only be used to reduce vigour, and as such it has pretty much died out as a technique, as the same result is much more easily achieved by selecting the right roostock in the first place (for most non-commercial plantings this means MM106 for apples, Quince A for pears).

 

Hope this helps!

 

Alec

[Gollum]

does your dad recognize one of these ?

 

 

[Pat Ferrett]

Id love to ask him but He passed away 11 years ago, the Bugger took all of his knowledge with him aswell

 

Do you use said implement ?

[Gollum]

Id love to ask him but He passed away 11 years ago, the Bugger took all of his knowledge with him aswell

 

Do you use said implement ?

 

Sorry i did not realise

 

It is Canker knife we use to use them in the apple growing industry years ago.

I do remember ring barking trees as well,

[Pat Ferrett]

No need to say sorry . Thanks for posting the picture though Its a shame that when people pass away that the knowledge they poses goes with them, Mind if He was here now he d only be telling me I was doing it all wrong