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Orchards were once planted by hand. Orchardists had to sow many seeds and
hope that most would develop into strong fruit-bearing trees. Trees were
twenty feet apart and grew very large. Each acre had one to two hundred
trees. Planting was done in the spring, and trees took nine to ten years
to reach full yield.
Orchards today are very different from orchards of the past. Growers now
buy small trees from nurseries and planting is done by machine. For maximum
yield and ease of picking, trees are smaller and planted much closer together.
An apple orchard can now have as many as three thousand trees per acre
and reach full production in three to four years.
Today's smaller apple trees are dwarfed varieties of the larger trees
of old. These dwarf trees are obtained by using the rootstock of selected
smaller trees. Rootstock is produced by bending saplings of select dwarf
trees into the ground, where they will form roots of their own. The tree
that naturally grows from rootstock will not necessarily bear the desired
fruit. To obtain the desired fruit, growers use the techniques of grafting
and budding.
Grafting is a method of growing a selected variety of tree by cutting
a thin piece of living limb from that tree and connecting and binding
it to the freshly cut trunk of rootstock. This piece of limbcalled scionwoodwill
mature into a duplicate of its parent tree. Budding is similar to grafting,
but, instead o fattaching a piece of limb to rootstock, an apple bud is
attached to a limb. These methods of selecting apple varieties actually
allow a single tree to bear several kinds of fruit, but as long as all
growth is from selected rootstock, the result will be a small "dwarfed"
tree.
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