North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

If we learn from our mistakes, I should be the smartest man in the world 
pretty quick...

As a newcomer to fruit trees - or pretty much any planting - I browsed 
the Internet for information, and some sites suggest that any tree can 
be kept small - kept to any size, they say - with summer pruning. I 
don't have much room (considering how much I want to plant), and I don't 
need much fruit of any one kind at one time, so I've tried to plant 
dwarf trees. But sometimes, that hasn't been possible, and I'd hoped to 
use summer pruning to keep things in check.

Unfortunately, I haven't found this to be as easy as advertised. In 
particular, I'm having a problem with my two-year-old Toka plum (though 
my Illinois Everbearing Mulberry, just planted this spring, is going to 
be at least as bad). This tree is extremely vigorous and just wants to 
grow and grow. The branches tend to get very long, and turn to grow 
straight up at the ends. If I cut the ends off with summer pruning, that 
hardly seems to slow them up. They quickly sprout out a ton of shoots 
just below the pruned cut, and all of them grow just as rapidly, so much 
that the added weight at the end is too heavy for the branch to hold up. 
(And if I cut them off closer to the trunk, I just get a mass of shoots 
every which way.)

I understand why cutting off the tip of a branch encourages it to sprout 
new growth,... but that's what summer pruning IS, isn't it? How do I 
slow this whole process down a bit? I'm ending up with a tree that looks 
terrible, and STILL grows too big.

Perhaps I'm not cutting back often enough? If I cut off the tip, then 
when it starts to branch out, cut it off again, below all the shoots? 
Almost all of the branching seems to occur at the very end. On the other 
hand, it's horribly hot and dry here in the summer, and I hate to be 
pruning trees under those conditions (both for my sake and the tree's 
sake). And I was told that, in this climate, I really need to stop 
pruning by mid-summer, so that the new growth can harden off before 
winter. So, was I just too gullible to believe all that about summer 
pruning in the first place?

Any comments? I am learning, but... not as quickly as I'd wish.

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)


--
Much of what has gone disastrously wrong in American policy, especially 
foreign policy, in recent years can be attributed to a reliance on blind 
faith rather than evidence. - Susan Jacoby