Hi again!
I just barely found this video:
At around the 13:00 mark, Stefan Sobkowiak talks about the advantages of NOT pruning, and that made me go, “Ohhhhhhhhh!” I think he must be describing what Fukuoka experienced with his fruit trees!
What Stefan says is that when you prune a tree, the tree thinks it’s being eaten, and it’ll put more energy into vegetative growth the next year. When you don’t, it’ll fruit earlier, and it’ll bear more fruit, and it’ll stay shorter.
He also recommends bending over the central trunk to turn it into a fruiting branch, instead of pruning it off. That will keep it from putting up suckers. That sounds like an awesome idea to me.
My next-door neighbor’s apricot tree and apple tree are both lovely, and bear lots and lots of fruit every year, but she has to prune off hundreds of vertical suckers at the top of both every year. I thought that was inevitable if you want to keep the tree short enough to harvest. But . . . maybe it’s not!
It would be really cool if all you have to do is train branches to bend downwards more, and make cuts only when you need to to make sure the trunk has enough airflow to dry off sometimes and therefore stay healthy when it’s snowed on.