It is late afternoon and darkness is approaching, yet it is truly worth pausing in front of these hazelnut trees of the Tonda di Giffoni variety, in the province of Avellino. The abundance of catkins is remarkable for such a young orchard. We are at the Lari farm, observing a third-year hazelnut orchard trained as a free bush vase with a single trunk (monocaule) and planted at a spacing of 5 × 4 meters. From a technical standpoint, this spacing could just as well have been 5.0 × 2.5 meters or 6.0 × 3.0 meters. After one year of management based on the “ZaragoZa” principles, pruning trials were introduced following a very clear concept: keep the plant as free as possible, with minimal intervention limited exclusively to the central part of the canopy. However, when working inside the canopy, cuts must always be made using the spur-pruning technique ( speronatura ). This is the key technical element of the system. Spur pruning keeps the inner part of the plant active and generates a...