Summer Pruning. 129 
period, or, in fact, at the beginning of the growing season, is 
also gaining wider adoption where frost injury is especially 
feared. It is not actual freezing, but a drop of two or three 
degrees below the freezing point which is feared, and during 
recent years such a teniperature has wrought havoc with some 
fruits, in early valley regions particularly. Later pruning, even 
after the bloom and foliage have appeared, has worked no injury 
to the trees, but it is less conveniently done than when the trees 
are free of foliage. 
Summer Pruning.—Summer pruning, to induce bearing, is, 
as has been previously intimated, but little employed in this 
State, for the constant tendency of our trees is to bear early and 
to overbear. Enough has, however, been done in individual 
cases to show that fruit-bearing is promoted by pruning after 
the chief growth of the season has been attained. If the prun- 
ing results in forcing out laterals late in the season it has been 
done too early. What is desirable is the strengthening or devel- 
opment of fruit buds, and this will be accomplished after the 
energy has been too far dissipated to make new wood growth. 
Summer pruning to check the too exuberant wood growth 
of some kinds of trees is employed to some extent, chiefly in the 
warmer parts of the State, where the vegetative process in some 
trees seems fairly to run riot, and unless checked is apt to ruin 
the tree by breaking to pieces when the wind and weight of fruit 
test its strength. The methods of summer pruning employed 
in different parts of the State for different fruits will be con- 
sidered in connection with the special chapters on these fruits. 
Summer pruning to preserve form is another matter, and 
relates in the main to pinching in, to check undesirable exten- 
sion and to direct the sap toward shoots in which growth is de- 
sired. This practise is approved by most of our orchardists, and 
is employed by them to a greater or less extent. More people 
believe in than practise it, however, because the summer months, 
with their long succession of fruits to be gathered and shipped 
or dried, and the additional consideration that there is always a 
scarcity of labor at this time, give the orchardist so much work 
to do that he is more apt to confine his “pinching” to a little that 
hé may do now and then when he has a few moments’ leisure than 
to do the work thoroughly and systematically. The result is that 
the regular winter pruning is the main operation for tree shaping 
in this State. 
There is such a great difference in opinion about summer 
pruning that it will be very difficult to make any assertions about 
it which will not be disputed. Much of this difference comes, 
of course, from different conditions prevailing in different trees 
and in different parts of the State, and some of these will be met, 
