A one-year-old apple tree can bloom with a hundred flowers? Fruit tree expert Lin Fangli has a new invention

On April 5, Lin Fangli (first from left), fruit tree expert, fruit tree teaching experimenter and adjunct associate professor at Henan University of Science and Technology, was observing the flowering of a 1-year-old apple tree.

Lin Fangli, 69 years old this year, lives in Tangseng Temple Village, Goushi Town, Yanshi City, Henan, and is a homegrown fruit tree expert. He has devoted himself to fruit tree research for more than 30 years and once successfully invented the “early fruiting and rapid abundance” new technology, in which apple bud seedlings planted in the current year bear fruit the next year, while traditional apple trees must be planted for 4 to 5 years before they can bear fruit.

But Lin Fangli was not satisfied. He had always had one wish, and that was how to make apples planted in flower pots bloom earlier and more abundantly. Under normal circumstances, because young apple trees have few branches and thin branches, even when they reach the flowering period, each plant has fewer than 20 flowers. In order to give bonsai apples, which can be both ornamental and edible, a good development prospect, 13 years ago he began experiments starting from the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of fruit tree fertilizer——experiment after experiment, failure after failure, and the experimental data alone filled several notebooks, which made Lin Fangli unable to eat or sleep peacefully.

In 2012, Lin Fangli decided to open a new path. He started with the trace elements of endogenous substances in fruit trees and spent 3 years developing a new type of pollution-free multidimensional liquid fertilizer. On August 12, 2015, he sprayed the pollution-free multidimensional liquid fertilizer on young apple trees planted on March 27 of that year. March 27 this year was exactly one full year since the fruit trees were planted. Lin Fangli was delighted to find that although the young trees were still less than 60 cm tall, they were covered with flowers, as many as 108. Lin Fangli was thrilled. The bonsai apple early-flowering and abundant-flowering technology that he had devoted more than 10 years to researching had finally been achieved!

At present, Lin Fangli has received more than 20 fruit tree achievement awards at prefecture and city level or above, and has also won the National Science and Technology Gold Medal awarded by the China Association for Science and Technology, and was hired as a fruit tree consultant by the **Production and Construction Corps. Lin Fangli told reporters that in the past, it took at least 3 years for young trees to bloom all over, while this technology can not only make young trees bloom earlier, but also advance the time of blooming all over by 2 years. “This technology is also applicable to mature fruit trees. It can promote more flowering and more fruiting in fruit trees, allowing farmers to benefit earlier and earn more.” Lin Fangli said.

Lin Fangli said that he is currently working to apply for a national patent for this new technology——fruit tree pollution-free multidimensional liquid fertilizer, and hopes it can benefit farmers eager to grow bonsai apples and give them a helping hand in escaping poverty and becoming prosperous.