Grapes are girdled at berry set to increase berry size or at veraison (berry softening or color break) to advance sugar and color development. Sometimes vines are double girdled to achieve both responses. The immediate effect of a complete girdle is to interrupt the movement through the phloem of food materials produced by the leaves. This increases foliar carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and plant hormones in vine parts above the girdle at the expense of the trunk and the root system. …

The Hickok Pruning Lopper, also called a tree shear, is a deceptively simple piece of equipment, its design masking thousands of hours of laboratory and field testing necessary to bring it into production. All that simplicity is based on some very sophisticated principles of cutting dynamics.The Lopper as Lever First, start with the principle of the lever, one of man’s oldest tools. The lopper—or scissor-type lever—is a Class I lever with its fulcrum or pivot poin …

The Hickok lopper is designed and built for the professional fruit industry. It is built to be lightweight and very well-balanced because we assume the user will be taking care in the use of his lopper. We could build to be indestructible, but it would be neither lightweight nor well-balanced.  A professional tree care person knows to: use a pruning saw or anvil-style lopper on old, dead wood or on limbs of diameter larger than two inches.  cut with the grain of the …