Pruning and Training - Growing Organic Orchard Fruits - page 635

rootstocks, like Mazzard and Mahaleb, you are faced with the challenges of
bringing the trees into production quickly, reducing growth, and maintaining
heavy crop loads. With dwarfing and highly productive rootstocks, such as
Gisela 5 or Gisela 6, the trees come into production quickly and tend to over-
bear, leading to loss of vigor and small fruits. With these highly productive
rootstocks, the challenges are to increase vigor and reduce crop load.
Types of Pruning
The pruning practices we discussed at the beginning of this chapter work
well for vigorous sweet cherry rootstocks. For trees on highly productive
rootstocks, we need to prune differently. Oregon State University has de-
veloped an approach to pruning highly productive cherry rootstocks using
thinning, stub, and heading cuts to maintain high vigor and reduce crop
loads ( figure 12.18 ➔ ) .