Did you know that fruit trees have required “chill hours” before they will produce fruit? Each tree, of hundreds of varieties available, has its own requirement. A chill hour is an hour of wintertime that the temperature drops below 40 degrees. If the temperature goes above 70 degrees, like it has in Southern California lately, all those chill hours before are wiped out. So naturally, I’m a little worried about my trees setting fruit.
The other thing I learned at my last Master Gardener meeting and pruning workshop is that the fruit’s sweetness comes from the leaves collecting sunshine. So there needs to be a good balance between leaves and fruit. Thank Dan Hodell for that info; he was our speaker at the MG meeting.
When I showed up with my power reciprocating saw, everyone at the pruning workshop thought the same thing: “ut oh”. No worries; I didn’t get to use it very much because I just didn’t have the time to really hack up the trees at Carmelitos Gardens. But I wanted to. They looked pretty scraggly.