After a year in which our Jonalicious apple tree, already well over the age it should be heavily producing, failed to produce much of a crop, Dad took an axe and led us all out back in the snow to the tree, where he proceeded to threaten it if it failed again while slapping it several times up and down the trunk with the broad side of the axe. We’d never seen him yell at a tree before, or anything else so weird, so it was quite memorable.
The tree produced a bumper crop that year.
While there isn’t much to the threats, of course, it is true that stimulating apple tree trunks by thumping the bark does do soething to the tree to induce heavy flowering...maybe like other plants that try to carry out one last hurrah to reproduce when they are dying, injuring an apple tree triggers a “last hurrah” response without the tree actually dying.
Great story.
After reading your comment, I did a quick search on the Internet hoping to find something about thumping an apple tree to help it produce, but nothing came up. :(
I told her to, in the fall, give the trunk a flogging with the garden hose.
She thought I had lost my mind but did it.
Next year the bush was full of flowers.
Flower and fruit trees produce best when they feel threatened.
The stress of beating the tree induces the tree to produce induces Ethylene,resulting in a larger yield the following season. Here, the stress is created by bending a branch up or down, but the result is the same.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005948918382
“Mechanically induced stress (MIS) was imposed on apple shoots by bending horizontal shoots upward and vertical shoots downward and its effect on internal ethylene evolution, polar auxin transport and cytokinin levels studied. Induction of stress caused a significant rise in internal ethylene production in the tissues under stress, decreased polar auxin transport and cytokinin levels and increased the percentage of floral buds in the shoots.... more at link”