I tried

Your search - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tyaCPteT3flt984lU1eq1Zglwhous1Mx76X7OjPHpaU ... - did not match any documents.

Why would my computer bring it up and not yours I wonder? I'll work on it. Meantime if you contact me at alandhaigh@gmail.com I'll send it to you.

Alan- This is what came up when I tried your URL, so I sent you an email.

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Thanks,

Mark

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tyaCPteT3flt984lU1eq1Zglwhous1Mx76X7OjPHpaU/edit?hl=en#

Maybe this one will work.

Nope. That one gives the same access permission stuff as the first link.

LOL

damn computers!..

Send me the article at

info@rsigrowers.com

I'd like to read it

turtleman49 we would all like to read it. When you receive it please resend it, your computer may have a different privacy or firewall setting. Al

I just posted it on my forum. For whatever reason GardenWeb doesn't seem to like the Word Format it's in..

Here is a link that might be useful: Al's Prunning Text

Boy you said a mouthful Alan, burp...excuse me while I digest it for a few years. My only serious comment is that it covers a great deal without going into a lot of detail on any of the points, that is very useful to me as it reminds me of the many things there are to keep in mind whilst pruning and training without having to dig it all out of a huge volume of info.. If I need more detailed info. on a particular point I can go look it up (hopefully). In essence, it is a great, big picture.

Oh, did you intend to leave out your 1/3 rule, I think that is the name, where scaffolds >1/3 the diameter of the trunk at their attachment points should be removed? Sorry if I bastardized that.

Thank you for posting the article.

Michael, "Pruning by Numbers" is a different article. The idea of this one was just to take certain arboreal facts and put them in a pruning context. For me to wrap my mind around something I need to know why and not just how.

I'm hoping some of you find this useful and also maybe will correct me if they think I've made mistakes- or even add some similar observations.

Harvestman, this is a great article! I only wish I had read it eight years ago when I was starting out. Pretty much every other pruning article out there just wants to give you A-B-C steps without any deeper intuitions. If you have the deeper understanding of how the tree is behaving you can detour from the simple A-B-C and get much better results. Here are a couple comments.

One problem I often have is since my trees are all pedestrian height some of them don't want to stay low and I need to work really hard. One of your points is for trees with too much vigor prune to a pendulous shoot. I did that and it worked on the somewhat vigorous trees but on the very vigorous e.g. pears it would send out a huge new shoot straight up from the cut point if I did that. The way I have finally gotten the pears somewhat under control is by thinning away all the vase shapes I had and letting a singular strong central leader completely dominate and "take off", and then I butcher it back regularly. That gives one overgrowth spot on the tree, which is bad but it leaves the rest of the tree to grow more normally and spur up. Its like a safety valve the tree can let off steam on: its wasting energy in one spot but the rest of the tree benefits and can stay balanced. I may be in a more extreme case than any of your plantings since I have pears on fullsize rootstock only 3' apart.

Re: stubbing, I agree that stubbing one-year apple or pear wood delays maturity, but on older lower wood stubbing can work well to make the tree more compact. I still do some summer stubbing on the top shoots to help let more light into the rest of the tree; this very top part I am not really wanting to fruit anyway since its 8'+ off the ground out of reach of all but my loppers. Still, I now do more thinning cuts so there is less reason to do summer stubbing since there are fewer scaffolds higher up and thus the shoots can only block so much light. Maybe I will eventually be able to skip stubbing the tops in summer, I have mostly stopped needing to do it on the apples already. Stone fruits are a separate category when it comes to stubbing. They grow more like grapevines and don't have the delayed maturity issues when stubbed, so I stub them like crazy. They need it, too: unlike apples which greatly reduce the amount of new wood they send out as they settle into fruiting, the stone fruits keep cranking it out.

Scott

It's a super article, and one I'm digesting carefully as well. I for one appreciate the concise nature and get-to-the point quality. But yes- if were to be considered as an outline, a summary, a set of precis for an expanded article, well, that would be wonderful. (Still better would be a walk through the work day with Alan explaining as he went after one had read the piece.)

:-)M

Scott, I sent out this correction on the bit about stubbing this morning.

"Thinning Cuts Encourage Fruiting- Stubbing Encourages Vegetative Growth. Stub cuts into annual wood effectively delays the maturity of any given branch while thinning cuts provide more light onto the older wood of remaining branches that tend to be more in the interior of the tree.

Stub cutting into older wood- particularly to wood with flower buds, will not excessively stimulate vegetative growth and can be a useful part of managing trees for fruit production- especially in pears but also varieties of apples that have their best flower buds on 2-year wood that is led with an excessively vigorous vegetative shoot."

As far as your method of butchering to create an central leader again a van Ende article somewhere in here- http://www.goodfruit.com/Search/index.php?urlprefix=%2F&search=&mod=CoreSearch&query=Bas+van+den+Ende&Search=Search ,explains high density (close spacing of vigorous rooted trees) pear production in Australia. They have the advantage of being able to control irrigation as a vigor regulator, but the method involves cycling all scaffold branches. Replacements are in line when old branches obtain too large of a diameter to function productively in limited space and must be removed. This method is widely used for other fruit as well.

H-man: I very much understand what you mean by the why bring important. It took me until after I finished college and was into the process of working in horticulture with both the schooling and work experiences to fill in the many gaps needed to really round off my education. It is as though there are 3 legs to the stool of learning, the hows, whys and the doing. Omit one leg at your own peril I'd say.

I also came to understand that it was much easier to remember the stuff being taught in college if I could understand the whys for some reason.

Again, thanks for the article.

Thanks all for kind words and even a couple of very professional edits I received via e-mail.

Michael, I think that humans may get an endorphin rush when curiosity is answered with understanding which helps inbed information. Or maybe it's adrenalin, which has already been connected strongly with memory retention in research. How and why doubles the pleasure of just how.

Anyway, a theory.

This article is very terse and dense. Most every paragraph inclines me to read it again and again to figure out what it means and how to apply it. Several parts of it are also ambiguous or unclear. It seems to me each paragraph or section of this article could be expanded into a chapter with pictures detailing exactly what is meant. That of course is a different sort of project involving lots more work but in my opinion would be entirely more useful. Particularly to less experienced individuals, but even to relatively experienced persons such as myself.
As this article stands, it is useful but easily cast aside and forgotten. It is not the type of work that I (YMMV) would refer to in the future. However, if this were in the form of a small book detailing all of the included principles with drawings and photographs, well, that would be something I would be inclined to keep and refer to in years to come. I would certainly be willing to purchase such material. I'm not suggesting you do any of this, I'm just presenting my own impressions.

Would it be appropriate to insert some words about sunlight directly reaching the fruit spurs? I don't know, but I read a paragraph or two about this in "Apples For the 21st Century" and it seemed to me this sort of information was lacking in everything else I had read.

TC, your criticism is very much appreciated but would be more useful if you gave me specific examples when you make comments like "several parts of it are also ambiguous and unclear". Sounds like a movie revue where your trying to help the consumer but I haven't charged any admission here. The comment that the article is "easily cast aside and forgotten" would be much more useful to that consumer than to me.

If your intentions are constructive you can e-mail me with more specific comments.

The article is not geared to novices and is meant to help the serious fruit grower who's already explored a lot of the conventional literature and has a pretty good handle on the basics.

If this were something ready to be published it would be accompanied with illustrations and photographs to make it easier to understand. I'm sorry you didn't find it very useful in its present form as I find the concepts in it extremely useful in guiding the thousands of decisions I have to make every day. I'm just glad a few others have found it useful in its present form.

Thanks to harvestman for offering this article. I have never read any book or article that covered all aspects of pruning, even Harris's book has room for improvement.Harvestman has offered the benefit of his experience as a tree specialist not as a writer with an English major. Even though I have read everything in the article before, seeing pruning through his eyes is a benefit to me. Al