I know your theory is correct. I've made the exact same observation in things like tomatoes and melons. I have additional issue of cool summer weather some years, which I doubt is a problem for you in Texas. Cool and wet combine to make very flavorless produce, cool and dry isn't a whole lot better. This year, summer started wet, ended dry, and was very, very warm to hottish, but never brutally hot, all summer, and it was the best year for fruit flavor-wise. Not quite as good in terms of yield as 2008 due to a late heavy frost/freeze a couple of nights in early May.

I would say that all but the very youngest trees (say, under 3-4 years in ground) are pretty much done putting out vegetative growth here by mid July. Young trees go much longer, I guess since they are strictly to mostly vegetative and don't need to put much effort into making flower buds for the next year. And, of course, fertilizing and watering practices and weather have some effect -- pour the water onto even a mature tree in summer, and it's likely to put out a bit of new growth, especially if it's in an environment where it gets a bit of fertilizer too, like the edge of a heavily watered and fertilized lawn.

At one time I visited the apple orchard of a famous hort professor in Oregon in a wet winter/dry summer climate. He said he didn't start irrigating until the shoots set terminal buds. So when I started my greenhouse, my plan was to not water until growth stopped. But I found out that the pluot and nectarine trees started dropping leaves from dry soil while they were still growing. So I've settled on trying to hold the plants in a state of considerably reduced growth in summer. This would be a small fraction of the growth rate in spring.

Outside I'd say that the trees do about the same. Reduced growth in summer but not zero. Although my thinking is that the pome fruit are more likely to stop growing than stone fruit.

In pots inside the stone fruit does stop growing completely. Brix is often higher on potted fruit but quality can be variable. These trees may be stressed too much and off flavors can develop.

Many of my trees in the greenhouse are Citation. That root is known to be not drought tolerant and is said to drop leaves under stress.

So my question about what you are seeing.

My apples and pears grow in the spring then slow down to a crawl as soon as it warms up. All the apples and pears are moderate growing except the Bosc, which is long and gangling and reaching skyward at a fast clip.

The apricots grow like demented kudzu any time they are awake. The way they grow, I wouldn't be surprised if they grow while they are dormant. My son put in 4 apricots this spring, and his are the same: growing like crazy.

Cherries and peaches seem to grow faster in the spring, but grow at a pretty steady rate any time they are awake.

My trees are on irrigation. I give them a really long deep soak and then let them dry out for about 3 weeks (depending upon weather). I prune in the spring, just before they wake up and I don't prune back hard, mostly thinning and removing crossing branches.

This wasn't my best year for peaches, but we didn't get any real heat until after the peaches were harvested. They didn't get watered any different than last year when they were superb.

Oregon:

Thanks for your input. So you're seeing a difference between pome and stone fruit. Kinda what I'm thinking.

Are your stone fruit on drought tolerant roots like Lovell and seedling? I'm wondering if I'd see different things on drought tolerant roots than on Citation.

Out here in the northeast all the commercial growers know that a dry summer makes great tasting fruit but they probably prefer the bigger fruit that tends to come with regular rain and lots of warm sun in between. Those big fruit really fill a bushel basket in a hurry.

Season before this one I let the weeds grow under my peaches hoping they'd suck up surplus water but there was so much wet cool weather the weeds made no difference. The peaches sucked until late summer when it finally dried out a bit and we had almost summer weather.

This summer was very dry but as was mentioned before some of us here (myself included) suffered from a too hard frost at least a week past petal fall for peaches. Made the harvest spotty for stone fruit.

Next season I'm going to try some root pruning and maybe woven landscape fabric to shed water as an attempt to make certain peaches less vegetative and higher in sugar.

Plums don't seem as vulnerable to these issues and nectarines are much less vigorous than peaches- at least the ones I'm growing here.

I may not be going for what fruitnut considers optimum fruit, however. I don't even want to have his high standards- I'm already spoiled enough.

Yes, pome fruit grows determinately, getting most growth with the spring surge while stone fruit is indeterminate and grows throughout the growing season. Insects have an affect on this as leaf hoppers and aphids can arrest growth and tend to on Euro plums and pomes. Unfortunately this arrest of veg growth is probably not helpful to fruit quality because they are sucking the carbs like an open spigot, mining for protean.

I agree w/ what's already been written. Apples and plums set terminal buds sooner than peaches, which tend to grow all summer here.

Generally it would be hard to drought stress trees here. However, this summer it started to get fairly dry later in the summer. The heavy mulch pack on some of the trees prevented light rains from getting down to the roots (mulch conserves water, but if too thick can prevent water from reaching the soil). It caused drought stress on a few trees which came on too suddenly to properly manage, and the trees that were affected were hard to turn around. Lost some leaves, and the leaves that remained didn't go back to normal.

It's not like tomatoes that when drought stressed will perk back up after watering.

Fruitnut, I don't know what the rootstock is. I have a favorite discount store that sells lovely healthy bare roots for cheap and I'm happy to not know what root stock in exchange for very nice trees at a lovely low price.

I'd be very surprised if the cherries are on anything but mahaleb. Probably the pears are on betulaefolia.

I just ordered stone fruit on St Julian and cherries on Mahaleb. I always order mm-111 for apples and the only pear I ordered this year will be on betulaefolia. I have one plum coming on Citation since I couldn't get it on St Julian.

Drought tolerance is not a consideration for me, since I irrigate. I have to look for good anchorage and cold-hardiness. I've got to get those trees through the winter before I can worry about how much water they want. (and they can have whatever water they want, the spoiled little things)

Post script: I ordered a knobbed russet and the seller says he has trouble getting the grafts to take on that variety. I told him that if it grafts better onto antonovka than mm-111, I would take it on antonovka.

So I may or may not be getting a knobbed russet and it might come on mm-111 or it might come on antonovka. However I can get it, I'll take it.

What I do in my orchard, is control the amount of fruit on the tree to effect the fruit quality. There are no late frosts and this season was dry so lots of thinning. Once a tree is mature size I let it bear lots of fruit so there is little vegetative growth, even with 2x weekly watering. I grow my fruit trees with mulch in the irrigated lawn, stone fruit is all shallow rooted. In a cloudy season like 2009 I thin more fruits to improve the flavor quality and branch growth. I sometimes use fertilizer on fruit load stressed or young trees while I am training the scaffold branches.

Water stress may improve fruit quality where there is much vegetation, but I find having the right fruit load effects quality and also vegetative growth.

Antonovka blows MM111 away from what I hear.
MM111 has nasty burrknot issues...

In Greece Argan trees are native to growing up anywhere on rural lands and many grow in olive orchards. They are deep rooted and can handle severe droughts. In Greece many people graft these Argan trees to European pear varieties. The success with grafting is very high, I tried some grafting on them and there was no fail and I was a first time grafter, that just observed how grafting was done on youtube.

The Argan trees receive water only from rainfall and through the summer months in a hot meditteranean climate like Greece there is very little rainfall. The fruit quality of these Pear varieties are simply amazing. I have never eaten any better tasting pears that are sweet and melt in your mouth. In North America the pears that are watered are no where in comparisson to these pears.

Kokos, those "nasty" burr knot issues have never been any problem in the 20 years I've been selling and growing hundreds of trees on it in southeastern NY. It is one rugged rootstock that saves me a lot of headaches. It finds water.

I have read of such problems also but it must not be an issue in conditions here or would have come up on one of the sites I manage by now. It's a very useful rootstock in many parts of the country and has not yet been replaced.

Have to admit I've never grown antonovka as it's not nearly as available. I thought of it as being most useful as a cold region rootstock.

Antonovka is probably the best apple root stock for the far north. It's a Russian apple and can take the cold, and it can take the wind.

It's a full size tree, no dwarfing at all. I intend to try it some day. I've got the room and I've dealt with full size apple trees before. Hey, ladders and fruit picking poles work just fine and a live happy tree is more important to me than picking without having to get up on my tiptoes.

There is one of those nurseries that specializes in cold weather apples that uses Antonovka for all their grafting. Other than that, you pretty much have to special order it. The general public doesn't seem to want full size trees.

(I've got a "no" beside that nursery's name in my notes, so I won't share the name. I can't remember why, probably bad Watchdog feedback)

It was very warm (especially at night) and humid, and it never stopped raining this summer (wettest summer on record)... Most of my later stuff was water logged and flavorless. I'd take drought conditions over the flood we had...