Has there ever been a dwarfing roostock for apples that tend to produce so many apples one year that they go into biennial bearing?
Such a stock would inhibit high production in such apples, perhaps reigning in the biennial tendency, smoothing out the year-to-year crops without hand thinning.
Any such critter?
I just have a few varieties of apple, but the most consistently over cropping ones are..........
Roxburry Russet
Winter Banana
Hudson Golden Gem
The shy bearers are........
Melrose
Suntan
Suntan is triploid, which could be part of the story.
I do think more dwarf trees tend to overcrop since they get more intense light through the canopy, but then again, they are so doggone much easier to thin.
Not sure if being triploid has anything to do with undercropping, as Gravenstein overcrops every other year here, and alternates with almost no crop.
I am guessing that there hasn't been any work done towards finding rootstock that imparts "limited crop" to an overbearer.
I will be checking with the Geneva rootstock breeders shortly. This has gotten me curious.
The advantage to dwarf roots is that you can thin the crop to what ought to be there. Very hard to do on the older Standard Varieties.
Should be no problem on M9 to put an end to biennial bearing.
My Roxburry Russet and Hudson Gold Gem crop too heavy each season, and yet continue to set full crops.
Probably because the trees are not 100% one variety, and the rest of the tree picks up the slack.
Idyllwild
simplepress
jafar
Marsha H
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