I won’t get any peaches from my trees this year. A lot of fruit trees had their fruit blossoms killed with extreme cold. For those lucky enough to have fruit set, here is a reminder to thin your fruit if it hasn’t been done yet.
Whenever possible, fruit trees will produce more fruit than they need and more than they can carry. There will often be a natural fruit drop, which should happen about now this year. However, most fruit trees benefit from additional thinning.
Thinning fruit will not only reduce stress on the tree branches, it will also result in larger and higher-quality fruit. Proper fruit thinning will also influence next year’s production. The buds for next year’s crop are produced in this growing season.
The idea is to have enough leaves to produce the food necessary for good fruit and bud development.
The most practical for homeowners to thin fruit is with pruning and hand thinning. Pruning will reduce the amount of fruit-producing wood and should have already been done. With our uncertain spring weather, it is better to not prune too severely. Hand-thinning is very labor intensive but will give accurate results.
Here are some guidelines on how to thin fruit on residential trees.
Apples and pears
Targeted thinning of apples helps to avoid or overcome alternate bearing apple trees. This is where one year the tree has a heavy fruit load, and the next year, very little.
Most apple and pear blossoms come in clusters. Thin apples and pears when they are around a half an inch in diameter, but definitely by the time they reach one inc diameter for apples and three-quarters of an inch diameter for pears.
Don’t leave more than one apple or pear per cluster. After that, thin the remaining fruit so there is six to eight inches between fruits.
Peaches and nectarines
Peaches and nectarines fruit on last year’s wood. These new branches are about the diameter of a pencil (I call them pencil branches).
Residential peaches and nectarines should be trained with four strong scaffold branches. A full-grown tree can carry about 160–200 peaches, so smaller trees should have less. This means there will be 40–50 peaches per scaffold. If you average 1.5 peaches per pencil branch, that means each scaffold should have 30–40 pencil branches on all the secondary, tertiary and quaternary branches.
Thinning pencil branches can be done with the winter/spring pruning.
After peaches or nectarines have set allow them to grow to about the size of a quarter and then thin them to one or two fruits per pencil branch. There should be a minimum of six inches between fruits. Thinning too soon may cause split pits and thinning too late will result in smaller fruit regardless of how heavily they are thinned.
Plums and apricots
Plums and apricots are quite easy. When they are about the size of a dime, thin the fruit so there is at least three inches between them.
Cherries
At times cherries may benefit from thinning if the fruit load is excessive, but generally they don’t need to be thinned.
When you thin the fruit on your tree it is best to not look down. You will see a lot of small fruit on the ground, but if you look up you will see adequate fruit load with proper spacing. This will give you a good yield with high quality fruit.
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July 03, 2023 at 06:00AM
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Reminder: thin your fruit trees - East Idaho News
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