A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum Fruit Forum My sister's fruit tree

Last year her neighbour cut off the branches growing on their side of their property. Now the tree is one sided. Normally at this time her tree is in full bloom but this year the tree hardly has any flowers on it? Could it be suffering stress from cutting off the large branches on the one side? I should also mention that our winters are below zero temps average minus 20 to minus 40 at times. Could this have an effect on the tree even though it rests for the winter.

Also I heard that fruit trees can be dormant in some years producing no fruit, is there any truth to this?

Ciao DaisyM-

I'll be the first to tell you I'm no fruit tree expert, but what I can do is share what I've observed with my own fruit trees over the 5 years of being in this house. We have several old fruit trees, exact age unknown. We have a pear and very large mulberry in the front yard, a cherry which has been poorly pruned and maintained, 5 small-fruited round plums, 2 larger-fruited round plums, 1 Italian prune, and 2 apricots. The apricots and plums act a bit biennial-ish, producing fruit in abundance every other year. The pear produces every year but I have to be über-vigilant or the birds and squirrels get most of the fruit. The mulberry is just a monster of fruit every year, but it doesn't have a very assertive flavour, so we eat them mostly straight off the tree as we wander throughout the garden. The cherry tree has been neglected and most of the fruit-bearing branches are very high up now, so it's pretty much a bird and squirrel feeder. We don't have a ladder that gets up that high. Apricots and plums are related, so that's where I would look first, to see if they normally behave that way, producing fruit every other year.