H-Man. My first planting was a Callery seedling, which I grafted over to suitable varieties for my area. As you might expect it took off like a rocket upward. After reading many of your post I realized that the limbs needed spreading downward and I have been gradually doing so a little each year. It is difficult to spread larger limbs and I partially broke one at the trunk in the process. Now I would like to make the last bend to a level much like the ones in the video. What is your opinion of cutting the spaces on the underside to allow an easier bend? Thanks, Bill

I make hinges like that all the time since reading an article by Bas van Ende in a NAFEX Pomona article well over a decade ago. It was a very useful article to me and I've no idea how one could find it today, although it is somewhere in my huge stack of old Pomona magazines. Published sometime in the '90's.

The hinge is very useful for bending excessively stiff branches but don't go more than a third of the branches diameter into its underside. If the branch won't bend keep making more cuts up the branch until it does- about an inch apart.

Occasionally I lose a branch to breakage, but not more than 5% of the time. It heals after a single season and probably winds up stronger.

H-Man. Thanks

Thanks for posting these videos HM. My dwarf apple trees are spaced between 4 and 6 feet apart which I believe is a little wide for the typical tall spindle system but looks just about right for this system. One thing I realized is I was bending limbs that were in there 1st year of growth and causing the growth to be stunted creating weak limbs. The video says to do the bending in year 2 which makes more sense.

I see this method of growing and pruning apples in the south of France twice a year. In Sept. -Oct. the trees are all under nets and are loaded with apples. Miles of apples. It is a beautiful sight and one commerial orchard here in RI prunes to similar method but without nets. It is so practical (in terms of picking) and I've never seen so much fruit on trees; and the trees produce fruit every year. I too enjoyed the videos. Mrs. G

I should have mentioned that I do a lot of tying down of branches to encourage fruiting even without following the Solaxe method completely. With vigorous varieties it is very oven useful to pull down upper tiers well below horizontal- even with vigorous one year shoots. The sooner they lose their vigor and begin fruiting the better for the shape of a (vigorous type) central leader tree. I use a lot of electric tape and string to tie these upper branches to lower ones or lower shoots.

I do the same thing when I need to get secondary branches to a more horizontal position. Many varieties of apples just want to grow straight up, including secondary and tertiary wood. I sometimes hold onto extra "scaffold" branches in a tier just to provide a place to tape secondary branches to. Once the permanent scaffold has enough well placed secondary wood I remove the surplus.

Pulling branches below horizontal works with pears and Euro plums as well to greatly accelerate fruiting and, if needed, to help dwarf the tree to keep it productive in much less space.

This post was edited by harvestman on Thu, Feb 5, 15 at 19:48

Looks like I've been doing this more or less all along, central leader and good spacing but I hardly do any tying down, done by early pruning and with fruits later on it will pull them down.
I wouldn't use wire to pull down branches like this guy in video.

Up until now, I've been using the so-lax pruning system. :-)
This year I'm gonna make more of an effort. I would have started already but the weather has not cooperated.

Konrad, the fruit will pull branches down, of course, but by doing so ahead of time the trees will generally begin fruiting sooner and in less space, should you choose to keep them compact. Fruiting is in itself dwarfing.

Also, in vigorous varieties it is very useful for keeping upper tiers from becoming umbrellas over the lower ones.

I have found tying down extremely useful to get Northern Spy to settle down to fruiting. On vigorous rootstocks you will wait a long time to get apples to do that on a new N. Spy. Maybe 10 years.

Would this method be worthwhile in pears, too?

It will have the same affect on pears as apples and E. plums.