To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] A date in the life of jujube farmers (China Daily)
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:57:47 -0600
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.