TALL HEDGEROW ORCHARDS

The advantages in using this training system in different fruit species are discussed with particular emphasis on planting distances, material for planting, pruning, orchard mechanization, picking and fruit quality.

Several types of flat forms for fruit trees were proposed in previous centuries with regard to appearance rather than profit. For this reason these forms never spread to any great extent.

A hedgerow system which did spread started to spread in Italy, in the farms of the Ferrara area, immediately after the first world war. In this the orchards were trained as palmettes with horizontal branches. This training system was used only for apples and pears and allowed easier fruit harvesting. It was, of course, very expensive and rather complicated, involving severe bending and heavy pruning to reach the ideal geometric shape. It was a training form typical of an agriculture rich in cheap labour. The heavy pruning also retarded the cropping of the trees but this was acceptable in an old fashioned agriculture where the return on the invested money was not an important factor.

Immediately after the second world war some elementary principles of plant physiology were applied to the old palmette scheme, and consequently this training system passed from the rigorously geometrical form to a semi-free, and, more recently, to a completely free form. This new hedgerow training system had the advantages of the traditional palmette, that is the flat shape forming a continuous hedge, and offered, at the same time, a solution to the problems arising from economic competition and from the evolution of modern orchard techniques. The flat trees allowed the total or the partial mechanization of many practices.

Economical, simple, towed or self-propelled platforms on which the workers could stand at different levels were built and the growers could reach an "assembly-line" system very close to that used in the industrial factories while avoiding heavy work with ladders.

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