Own-Root Fruit Trees
Many species of fruit (e.g. fig, filbert, olive, pomegranate) are commonly grown on their own roots, as there may be no great advantages to using a special rootstock, or suitable rootstocks may not be readily available. However even for fruit trees which usually are grown grafted on a rootstock, there can be advantages in growing them on their own roots instead, particularly in the traditional coppicing systems advocated in both sustainable agriculture and permaculture. Disadvantages of using own root trees can include excessive size and excessive production of wood (thus very long times until the start of fruit production), although training branches horizontally and limiting pruning to summer only may help encourage fruit production at an earlier age. There is a lack of research on the use of the own root method in large scale systems.
Read more about this topic: Fruit Tree Propagation
Famous quotes containing the words fruit and/or trees:
“The goldenrod is yellow,
The corn is turning brown,
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.”
—Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885)
“But we still remember ... above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to us, though still green and crude,—the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but New English too, brought hither, its ancestors, by ours once. These gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)