| Axel: Yes. Dormancy is induced by training the branches horizontal and stripping the leaves by hand to coincide with the onset of the dry season, at which time any irrigation is shut off. This causes the trees to blossom in about six to eight weeks. Chemicals like Dormex have been tried, but the hazard and expense they pose makes them unusable in most locations. Apples are grown commercially in Honduras, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Egypt. Uganda did a large study in the Kabale region in 2005, and published a 70-page paper on it that you can Google. In Asia the main problem the indigenous farmers face is cheap imports from China crowding out their local market, making it impractical to grow apples even if the climate allows it. The main issues facing the tropical farmer has been the short shelf life of the low-chill Anna and Dorsett Golden, plus all the disease that a tropic climate can breed on apples. They've tried growing all the commercially popular apples like Jonathan and Red Delicious, which is silly as the quality would be terrible, as they have found out. This may seem like a hair-brained effort to try, but the rewards can be huge. Africans dream of eating an apple someday, as they represent prosperity to them. In an East African market apples from South Africa sell for a dollar a piece, well out of the range of most people. But a farmer that harvests three hundred apples off his tree can send his kid to University that year. Uganda had focused its efforts on growing apples commercially instead of just subsistance farming, as this is the key to lifting people out of poverty. I'm convinced the key to success will be in finding the right varieties, which most likely will not be what we would consider a standard low-chill apple. I'm focusing on the disease-resistant and long-keeping varieties like Williams' Pride and Enterprise from the PRI breeding program that don't need cool nights to color up and have shown to be able to tolerate a good deal of heat. Lots of testing will have to be done. Which presents the problem; first of all getting apples through customs (even with an import permit this can be tricky due to corrupt officials), transported to farmers, educating the farmers on apple culture, and getting starving people to give up some of their worn-out farmland to test a crop that has never been tried there before and not cut them down for firewood before they've bore the first crop. It will take a miracle of God to make this happen, which is what I'm counting on as I'm shipping 200 trees to Rwanda the end of this month to an island in Lake Kivu. Pray for the mayor of the island, as we are asking him for government land to plant them on. Last I heard last week he had Typhoid fever and was very ill (the things we take for granted in this country). Like I said, it will take a miracle of God- which could happen. Applenut | 
