Thinning fruit on your fruit trees

June 8, 2010 at 3:57 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Thinning fruit on your fruit trees is important for several reason.  You will cull imperfect shaped fruit while it is immature, leaving the remainder to mature and that will be of higher quality.  You can reduce an excessive amount of fruit so that the tree can save its energy toward the following year’s crop.  Removing extra fruits will also lessen the weight issue, preventing limb breakage.  With a havey crop on the branches, they should be propped or supported in some fashion to prevent breakage.  Thinning fruit will help the quality of the harvest also by removal of interior fruits which get little light to color and sweeten up when they are on branches deep inside the tree canopy.  Conversely, in hot sun areas, thinning fruit on the outside of the canopy will help prevent sunburn.   Those remaining fruits can be shaded by leaves.   In this case, thin the outer fruits to those slightly inside the tree’s leaves to give some shade to the fruit.  Balancing a crop size is important to keeping the crop consistent annually.  Some cvs. are biennial cropping, but most will fruit at least regularly if thinned each year to give a more or less consistent yield.  If you let a heavy crop mature one year, the tree may take it easy and rest the following year since much energy was expended to mature that crop and you have to wait another year for the tree to get that energy back to produce more again.

A good rule of thumb for larger fruits is to use your hand widith for distance between fruits.  Use your hand length for larger sized fruits.  You can always not thin fruits, but you will get many small sized fruits rather than larger fruit.  Excessive thinning will produce the largest sized fruits, but for most home orchardists, a larger bounty is preferred to larger individual size of fruit.

Type of fruit is also a determining factor in thinning.  Cherris of all sorts, sweet and tart/pie/sour, do not need thinning.  Apricots, plums, pluots, plumcots, will benefit from some thinnning.   Apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, persimmons will benefit from thinning, as will grapes.  cane berries and blueberries will not need thinning by the fruits, but regular pruning of the wood should take care of this need.

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