....do I need to prune them into being?
I am trying to grow a HoneyCrisp apple vertical cordon and have been following pruning advice from books concerning this, yet the branches still don't look like spurs and it hasn't given fruit yet either. It is 3-4 yrs old and I only recently found out that I needed to plant another apple next to it for it to give apples, duh).
Thanks anyone for this silly beginner's question.
Elizabeth
Hi Elizabeth,
The question of whether you need to have another variety next to it is partially dependent on where you live......if you lived in the city of Portland, the odds are very good that there is a neighbor with a sufficiently adequate pollinator that you wouldn't even need to worry about it.
Did you get flowers this year? That will tell you a lot right there.
If you are trellising the tree (cordon style), then the odds favor that you got this tree on something like a M9 rootstock or something sufficiently dwarfing. In that case, then it would seem to me it should start producing flowers about now because the dwarfing rootstocks produce earlier.
As to helping the tree to produce, the short answer is "no" you don't need to prune it into bearing.....it should do that on its own.....too much pruning can even be counter-productive. However if you are training the limbs to be a little bit more horizontal you may "encourage" the fruiting spurs to develop. so, I would focus more on "training" the limbs, not pruning them at this point.
There is also another technique where you clip back some of the shoots to three or four buds in the summer time, but I am not expert on this and you would need to contact someone with more experience.
Once again, the big question is if you are getting flowers. If not, I think patience is still in order.....(but check to make sure the tree has at least 6 hours of sunlight or so in order to make sure light is not the problem).......If you are getting flowers, but you are not getting fruit, then the first thing I would think of as being a problem is not having a cross-pollinating tree and the second thing I would think of is that the weather was too cool or the bees too insufficient.
Other thoughts welcome.....virtually no question is too silly, imo....
Thank you DonRicks. That all makes a lot of sense. I will be more aware of flowers, bees, etc...(I just put out some mason bee tubes this year). Has anyone trained with the Lorette system of spur developing. I keep seeing that in the books but people at nurseries I ask, say just let the spurs develop on their own. If anyone has used the Lorette system, would you share at what time of year you do it and also if you keep on doing it throughout the growing season?
Thanks again,
Elizabeth
I don't think there is particularly anything to to to make the tree form fruit spurs. But you do have to be careful that you don't prune them all off.
I just planted my first Honeycrisp about 2 weeks ago, so don't know what the tree is going to do. Mine is on mm-111, so probably going to behave differently than yours, anyway.
Have you verified that Honeycrisp bears on spurs?
Hi Oregon Woodsmoke,
Honeycrisps are spur bearing, I've read in several places. I just consulted the place I bought apple trees from One Green World and they said that "Pruning, especially during the growing season, usually speeds up the process of spur formation." So I think I will continue with the lorette system. I just bought The Backyard Orchardist by Stella Otto and am looking forward to reading about how future fruit begins in the chapter 13. It looks like a really good book.
Thanks,
Elizabeth
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