yoderjac
5 year old buck +
Most won't be interested or have the setup to do this, but I thought I'd post it just in case. There are times when I want to wake up a containerized tree early and grow it indoors. One example of this was the year I started persimmons from seed for rootstock. After the first growing season, they were not quite large enough for grafting. I woke them up early and let them produce a bit more diameter and then grafted them. I let the grafts leaf-out under controlled indoor conditions in the early spring and then acclimated them to the outdoors.
The question becomes, when can you bring a deciduous tree in, wake it up, and still get good growth through the growing season. Different trees have different dormancy requirements. They require a different amount of chill hours. This is also confusing because chill hours are also used to refer to fruiting.
This is complicated by the definition of chill-hour. There are several models out there for chilling. I used the Utah model. It is basically a table that relates a chill-hour multiplier to temperature for each wall clock hour. So an hour at 50 degrees does not count the same as an hour at 40 degrees.
I also have a cold room where I keep containerized trees dormant over winter. On another thread, http://habitat-talk.com/index.php?threads/acurite-monitoring-for-indoor-tree-growers.6608/ , I talk about the temperature/humidity sensors I use to monitor both the cold room and my growing area as well as the outdoors.
It turns out that with the Acurite website, you can download the detailed temperature readings in an excel CSV format. So, I developed a spreadsheet that ingests the downloaded CSV data from my cold room sensor and calculates the number of chill hours my trees have received. I can enter the start date when a tree when into the room dormant and tell how many chill hours is has received since. This could just as easily be done for folks who overwinter their trees outside by placing the sensor there.
While I doubt many will have the need to do this, if any do, just drop me a PM and I'll send you the spreadsheet.
Thanks,
Jack
The question becomes, when can you bring a deciduous tree in, wake it up, and still get good growth through the growing season. Different trees have different dormancy requirements. They require a different amount of chill hours. This is also confusing because chill hours are also used to refer to fruiting.
This is complicated by the definition of chill-hour. There are several models out there for chilling. I used the Utah model. It is basically a table that relates a chill-hour multiplier to temperature for each wall clock hour. So an hour at 50 degrees does not count the same as an hour at 40 degrees.
I also have a cold room where I keep containerized trees dormant over winter. On another thread, http://habitat-talk.com/index.php?threads/acurite-monitoring-for-indoor-tree-growers.6608/ , I talk about the temperature/humidity sensors I use to monitor both the cold room and my growing area as well as the outdoors.
It turns out that with the Acurite website, you can download the detailed temperature readings in an excel CSV format. So, I developed a spreadsheet that ingests the downloaded CSV data from my cold room sensor and calculates the number of chill hours my trees have received. I can enter the start date when a tree when into the room dormant and tell how many chill hours is has received since. This could just as easily be done for folks who overwinter their trees outside by placing the sensor there.
While I doubt many will have the need to do this, if any do, just drop me a PM and I'll send you the spreadsheet.
Thanks,
Jack
