May 5, 2023
Fun Fact: Farmers in England used to threaten poorly producing apple trees with violence to encourage them to bear fruit.
If the threat didn’t work, the tree would be shot the following year. Completely coincidently, this total overreaction often worked by relieving a tight, inhibiting bark.
If violence isn’t a-peel-ing to you (against your core values?), you could try dressing your tree in ladies’ clothes instead. In Germany, orchardists saw a tree that wasn’t producing as male and dressed it in petticoats to encourage a change to “fruitful femininity”. Alternatively, a poorly producing “male” tree could be tied to a fruitful “female” tree with straw and Christmas sausages, they would be proclaimed to be married and urged to bear fruit.
I hope they lived apple-y ever after.
