FRUIT VS SHOOT
Note 1: I have some plants leftover from this past weekend’s plant sale here at the farmden. Contact me by June 24, 2022 if you’re interested in purchasing to pick up any white currant, black currant, fig, or gooseberry plants (a number of varieties of the latter two).They’re all discounted at 25% off.
Note 2: My farmden is open for a Garden Conservancy Open Day on Saturday, June 18, 2022 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Registration is required, here.
Shoots versus Fruits
I’ve been playing around with the orientation of some of my trees’ branches to influence how they grow. Branches pointed skyward generally are inherently vigorous, giving rise to long shoots, especially from their topmost buds. At the other extreme are branches oriented horizontally. They’re generally weak-growing, and tend to produce fruit buds rather than vigorous shoots and leaves. The cool thing is that if you or I change branch orientation, it changes the growth and fruiting habit of that branch.
Bending and tying branches is a good way to balance shoot growth and fruiting, especially of apple and pear trees. Both types of growth are needed. The fruits for us to eat, and the shoots to “feed” the fruit and to provide places on which to hang the fruits. Shoot growth is also needed to periodically replace old wood.
Branch bending to regulate growth and fruiting is especially evident with an espalier, which is a tree grown in an orderly, usually two dimensional form. Lurking behind the many forms, fanciful and otherwise, for espaliers is an appreciation for their effects on growth and fruiting.
Achieving Balance
Backyard apple and pear trees commonly put too much of their energy into shoot growth, a problem that can be exacerbated by overly enthusiastic pruning and over-fertilization. One way to coax an overly vigorous tree into bearing is by pulling upright branches downward, affixing them in that direction. This may seem an unnatural way to treat a plant, but it does help a tree to get started fruiting. Once fruiting begins, the weight of the fruit will keep branches down.
Sometimes fruit pulls a branch down so much that it’s too fruitful and needs invigoration. Asian pears are prone to bearing too heavily too early in their life, especially if grafted on dwarfing rootstocks; the result is a stunted tree. The cure is to drastically cut drooping branches back to more upward growing — and, hence, vigorous — side shoots. Or to stake branches into more upright positions.
Bending down branches spreads them, which, along with correct pruning, also lets all branches bathe in sunlight. With many upright growing branches, the interior of a tree becomes too shaded to produce fruit buds or even leaves. 
Branches that are spread at an early age make wide angles with the trunk. That wide angle attachment becomes a strong juncture, one that will not break when eventually weighted down with fruit, as often occurs with branches having narrow crotch angles.
Practical Matters: How to Do It
On very young trees which are still forming their main branches around the trunk, I start spreading the new shoots when they are just a few inches long. After bending a shoot carefully so as not to break it, I hold it in that position by snapping a spring-type clothespin on the trunk with the tail of the clothespin holding the shoot down. 
Another way to hold this wide angle is to press one end of a toothpick into the shoot and the other into the trunk, just enough to keep the toothpick in place.
For older branches, I use either a stiff wire or a length of wood with a brad driven in each end. (I’ve previously removed the brad’s head and sharpened what remains.) 
Tying a string around a branch, and then to a weight on the ground or to the tree’s trunk is another way to pull a branch down. Or, you can affix a weight right to the branch. For instance, glue a clothespin to a rock, then clip it to the branch.
After a few weeks, the ties or weights or clothespins can be removed. The branches will stay in place.
Ideally, re-orienting the branches of apple and pear trees achieves a favorable balance between shoots and fruits. To this end, strive for about a sixty degree angle to the trunk. I try to keep the branch straight as it is oriented to this angle. If the branch has a bow in it when pulled down, overly vigorous shoots are apt to grow from buds at the topmost part of the bow.
Don’t expect immediate payback for all this care and effort. A year or more might elapse before an apple or a pear tree forms fruit buds, and fruit buds form fruit buds the season prior to actual fruit production. It’s worth the effort in the long term.
PLANT SALE, PLANT LIST
Plant Sale
•This year the 14th(?) Annual Plant Sale will be held live, here at Springtown Farmden in New Paltz, NY.
•Plants, available in limited quantities
•Here’s a not necessarily complete list of what’s available (pricing not yet determined):
APPLE (Redfree)
BLUEBERRY (lowbush, Berkeley highbush)
BLACK CURRANT (Belaruskaja, Titania)
RED/WHITE CURRANT (Red Lake, Primus)
FIGS (Sicilian, LSU Purple, Brown Turkey, Rabbi Samuel, San Piero, Unknown)
GOOSEBERRY (Captivator, Chief, Glendale, Poorman, Red Jacket
GARLIC CHIVES
GRAPE (Glenora, Brianna)
HARDY KIWIFRUIT (2 species)
HARDY ORANGE (Poncirus trifoliata)
HAZELNUTS (blight resistant Somerset, Raritan)
HELLEBORE
MEDLAR (Breda Giant, Puciu Mol)
NANKING CHERRY
PEAR (Asian Tsu Li, European Harrow Delight)
PULMONARIA
SWEET WOODRUFF
TOMATOES (heirloom varieties Valencia, Nepal, Pink Brandywine)
WILD GINGER
This year, there’ll also be lots of books (in addition to the ones I wrote), some for sale and some free. The books cover a wide range of gardening topics.
Date and Time: June 12, 2022, 9:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Location: Springtown Farmden in New Paltz, NY
•Parking is available on the street, in the two driveways at the sale, and at the DEC boat launch a few hundred feet north on the opposite side of the street.
•To prevent overcrowding with cars or people, please plan on staying no longer than 15-30 minutes. Thank you.
•You must be (correctly) masked to attend this live sale, Again, thank you.
REGIMENTING TOMATOES
What’s Better: Loosy Goosy or Soldier Straight?
I wonder how much our gardens reflect our personalities? Some gardeners clip their yew bushes “plumb and square;” other gardeners clip or shear away at their plants more haphazardly. Even in the vegetable patch, a temperament may be reflected in the way tomatoes are grown: Do the plants sprawl over the ground with abandon, are they contained within strings woven up and down the row, or are they neatly staked? (Woven tomatoes or those grown in wire cages are more or less sprawling plants, held aloft.)
Whatever your temperament, a good case can be made for staking tomatoes. Tomatoes on a staked plant are larger and ripen earlier than those on a sprawling plant. Good air circulation around leaves and fruits of upright plants lessens disease problems. And fruits held high above the ground also are free from dirt and slug bites. You’ll harvest less fruit from each staked plant, but since staking makes best use of the third dimension, up, staked plants can be set as close as eighteen inches apart. So staking gives the best yields per square foot — especially important in small gardens.
Flavor Picks
Tomato varieties suitable for staking are so-called “indeterminate” types, which form fruit clusters at intervals along their ever-elongating stems. “Determinate” varieties, in contrast, bearsfruits at the ends of their branches, so if a plant was pruned for staking would be reduced to a single short stem capped by a single cluster of fruits. Seed catalogues and packets usually indicate which varieties are suitable for staking.
Determinate varieties are bushy plants that need little regimenting. They also ripen their fruits within a shorter window of time.
So what’s not to like about determinate varieties? Flavor! With fewer leaves per fruit than indeterminate varieties, flavor suffers. That concentrated ripening period also can stress the plants, making them more prone to disease.
As you might guess, I grow only indeterminate varieties of tomatoes. Flavor is my main criterion in selecting a variety to grow.
Staking
When choosing a suitable stake for staking (indeterminate, of course) tomato plants, don’t be misled by the puniness of tomato transplants. A tomato stake needs to be be six to eight feet long and metal or at least one by two inches thick if made of wood. I use EMT (electrical metallic tubing) conduit, 5/8 inch diameter and 10 feet long, cut down to 7 feet. It’s easy to pound into the ground (okay, I’ll admit that here on the floodplain there are no rocks), easy to remove, and reusable for years and years.
Most books and other sources of information suggest “planting” your stake along with your tomato plant to avoid root damage later on. Not true. My established tomato plants never bat an eyelash (figuratively speaking) as I pound in metal stakes only a couple of inches from their stems. And there’s a good reason to wait until the plants are well-established; by then, chance of cold damage is reliably history. Early planted stakes would interfere with my trying to throw a protective blanket over a row of staked tomatoes should cold threaten.
With the base of a stake set a couple of inches from a plant and a 3 foot length of iron pipe, capped at one end and slid over the conduit’s free end, the stake pounds in easily with repeated lifting and forcefully lowering.
Indeterminate tomatoes are vines, but not vines that can climb by themselves. So they need to be tied to their stakes. Material for ties should be strong enough to hold the plants the whole season, and bulky enough so as not to cut into plants’ stems. Coarse twine or cotton rags, torn into strips, are good materials. I use sisal binder twine.
The usual recommendation, when tying, is to first tie a knot around the stake tightly enough to prevent downward slipping, then use the free ends of the rag strip or twine to tie a loose loop around the plant’s stem. False! With every foot or so of growth, I tie a single loop loosely around stem and stake above a node; the string can’t slip down lower than the node.
Pruning
Now for the pruning: Confine each plant to a single stem by removing all suckers, ideally before any are an inch long. A sucker is a shoot that grows from a bud originating at the juncture of a leaf and the main stem.
Go over your plants at least weekly, using your fingers to snap off each side shoot. (Cutting the shoots with a knife or pruning shear may transmit disease between plants as a blade touches cut surfaces.) Occasionally step back and refocus your eyes on the plant as a whole; I find that I sometimes overlook a sucker that has snuck up with two feet of growth I missed as I focussed on still small shoots just appearing from buds.
One final bit of pruning that some gardeners practice is to pinch out the growing tip of the plant when the stem reaches the top of the stake, then continue to remove any new leaves or flowers that form. This is a little chancy, since the effect depends on the maturity of a plant’s leaves and fruits. At worst, you reduce yield to a few clusters of fruit. But at best, your tomatoes are even earlier and larger. It may be worth a try on a couple of plants.
How do your tomatoes grow, up or sprawling. A case can be made for “up.” But you need the right variety, stake, and method of pruning.
