Concepts for Understanding Fruit Trees, by T.M. DeJong
Professional fruit growers looking for a good understanding of the principles of how fruit trees function on a fundamental level have much to gain from Dr. Ted DeJong’s Concepts for Understanding Fruit Trees. Packed into just over 100 pages is a systematic description of how shoots, roots, leaves and fruits play a part in the tree’s carbon economy.
DeJong’s thesis is that “There are a few unifying concepts that make much of the general behavior and responses of fruit trees to the environment or management fairly easy to understand and predict.” He sets forth in the introduction how fruit production is ultimately a function of two factors: how efficiently the tree captures external resources (sunlight, carbon dioxide, nutrients, water) and how efficiently it distributes those resources. After a short description of the resource capture (carbon production) process, he focuses for the rest of the book on how the various organs of the tree — shoots, roots, fruits, etc. — compete for the distribution of that carbon. DeJong argues that “understanding the scheme of assimilate distribution within fruit trees allows for a more complete understanding of how fruit trees function and how horticultural manipulation of fruit trees can influence the growth of various organs, as well as how specific organ growth can be optimized to meet specific objectives.”
The book is short but dense, with plenty of helpful illustrations. There is lots of terminology, though, much of which — depending on the reader — requires keeping a good reference guide or the internet close at hand.
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