North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["MARIE ASHTON" <bwoodtx@verizon.net>]

Here in Brownwood, Texas where there is a USDA Pecan Experiment Station, 
large old pecan trees have been pruned back to where there was only a 3 or 4 
feet of stubs on each of the branches off the main trunk. In 2-3 year they 
had medium production and by 5-6 years they had good production.

I believe cutting the bark halfway around the tree is called girddling. It's 
not a very wide cut so that it will heal over and next year the trees can be 
griddled again (at a slightly different place. This has been pacticed in 
China for 100's of years on Jujubes. It's hard on the trees though and I 
believe that with time the trees will be become stunted.

They usually use it on some of the jujube varieties that have great fruit 
but poor production. The varieties that produce heavy crops anyway they do 
not girddle.

Regards,
Richard Ashton
Oak Creek Orchard
www.oakcreekorchard.com
bwoodtx@verizon.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lucky Pittman" <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] A date in the life of jujube farmers (China Daily)


> At 09:14 AM 11/30/2006, Tom wrote:
> > Sounds like a wound is inflicted on the tree, spurring reproduction
> > activities.  This works with many plants.
>
> At the risk of inciting my beloved female NAFEX friends to come after
> me with pitchforks and torches, there's an old saw:
>
> " A dog, a wife(husband), a hickory(or jujube) tree,
> The more you beat 'em, the better they be."
>
> Now, I would NEVER advocate beating your dog, or your wife, but
> there's a lot of anecdotal, and some scientific evidence, that
> beating a fruiting tree can incite heavy production.
>
> In some of the old Southern pecan orchards, they bring senescent
> trees back into production while new trees are coming along by
> drastic pruning - shearing off all major limbs on one side, each year
> for 4 consecutive years(north side one year, south the next, east
> next, then west, etc.) - I've even seen some, lately, that were
> sheared back to a single stub, sticking up 10-15 ft in the air.  Not
> pretty, but if they can get 8-10 years worth of production out of the
> old trees while the new ones are reaching bearing age, they can
> maintain some level of cash flow, removing the old trees once the new
> ones come into production.
>
> Lucky
>
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