9/8 FRUIT GROWING 



round the base of the tree. All their branches are cut away and the top 

 of their trunk is grafted into the trunk of the tree below the upper edge of 

 the wound. The old tree is thus provided with a new root system which 

 enables it to survive. 



759 - The Fruiting of Trees in Consecutive Seasons. — duke of Bedford and Pickering 



S. U. Fifteenth Report of the Wobutn Experimental Fruit Farm, pp. 1-19. I<ondon, iyi6. 



The view that fruit trees tend to bear heavily and lightly in alternate 

 seasons is often made the basis of a recommendation to thin a heavy crop 

 borne one year, in order to obtain a better crop the succeeding year. It 

 appears, however, that the tendency towards alternate cropping, as it may 

 be called, is very feeble, and that there is at the same time an equally 

 potent tendency towards consecutive cropping, that is, that a tree bear- 

 ing particularly well or badly during one season, will probably do the same 

 in the succeeding season, whilst the chief factor in determining gccd or poor 

 bearing is undoubtedly the atmospheric conditions, and not any innate tend- 

 ency of the individual tree to either alternate or consecutive fruiting. The 

 existence of a tendency towards alternate bearing is indicated by the 

 fact that young trees, if prevented for four years from bearing after they 

 have come to the age for so doing, will bear exceptionally heav}^ crops as 

 soon as they are allowed to bear. But it was only in one series of expe- 

 riments on some 300 young apple and pear trees during the seasons 1899 

 to 1903, that such a tendency was actually recognised. Observations on 

 the same trees, made when they were younger, during 1894 to 1897, 

 showed that their tendency then was towards consecutive bearing, and 

 in another case of apple trees where the observations apply to over 5 700 

 instances, extending from 1904 to 1915, the tendency has been, with only 

 one slight exception, towards consecutive bearing But this tendency 

 affects the results to only a slight extent, about 12 per cent, the remaining 

 88 per cent being attributable to peculiarities of the season, and not to 

 the individual behaviour of the trees. It is noticeable that the prepon- 

 derating influence of external conditions becomes more marked as the 

 tree is left more to its natural habits, i. e., as it is less pruned, and, also, 

 as the age of the tree increases ; and it is more marked in the case of 

 trees on the paradise stock than in these on the crab stock, this being 

 doubtless a consequence of the latter coming less rapidly to full maturity 

 than the former. 



If, in a plantation consisting of a large number of individual trees, 

 whether of the same or of different varieties, it is found that good and bad 

 fruiting seasons alternate with each other, it is evident that such alterna- 

 tion must be caused by some conditions affecting all the trees alike and 

 not to any tendency to alternate bearing exhibited by the individual trees ; 

 for such a tendency, if it existed, would be exhibited by different trees 

 in different seasons, and the effect of it would be to bring about uniform 

 production in the plantation as a whole. The alternation of good and bad 

 years has been uniformly exhibited to a most marked extent in some 

 plantations available for observation over a period of 20 years. As the 



