Hello, it’s the third week of July and we’re just doing some fruit thinning. This is quite late fruit thinning but it’s still worth going over your crops and removing diseased apples and removing apples which are going to break branches. That is a problem.
This one is what we called brown rot. If you're going to look at this apple here, this apple has been infested by brown rot. You see it’s going to a little bit a squishy. Those are not good at all and there’s one another over here but now are two. And as so often the case, it looks like one but when you get it down there are some two or three. Those will never do any good and these really should be removed from the orchard on a daily bond because there’s no chemical protection against this particular brown rot organism.
So, I’m going to put this down here. I’m going to take a little branch and I’m just going to show you something else. These are called Lord Lambourne. It’s a very good variety. It’s not the best flavored apple in the world but it’s really, really good flavor. There are some tasty ones but this is one of the trees which if you’re going to have one actually in your garden, Lord Lambourne is one of the contenders. This is very self tall and it’s a very good, steady regular cropper.
I have done too much thinning usually into the month of June, drop where apples sort themselves out and you get few right numbers. I’ve worked some of the 1:22 to mow it always and we do always thin.
Now, I’ll just show you this branch. This is a rope of apples. This is a rope of apples here, like 18 apples here so this is already weighing about 2 kilograms and this too are growing. So, this branch is probably going to break if I don’t actually remove some of these apples. It seems terrible to do that.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, you’ve got a small garden and you really want to maximize your apple crop, you can support this with stakes. I've seen this done in France or you can do what they call May poling that can drive a large, strong tall stake and a wooden pole near the center of the tree and you can hang the branches up but we are not tall we don’t ask you to do this.
So, I’ve got about 18 apples here. I’m just going to take off a number of them obviously looking for any which are blemished. I’m just going to roll this off so I can start picking them. That’s ones a little bit blemished. That’s not a bad blemish. I really will take some of this off. You see here when you got three apples stuck close together, if you’re not careful you pull them off, you may get all as one, just hold this one, twisting that. I’ve just twisted that off. That’s very moderately blemished and it’s holding next to it, just twisting that off carefully.
Now, below that, one is underneath. It doesn’t color up so it’s slightly blemished. This seems terrible pulling apples off and chucking them away but we know from experience, this branch is carrying so many apples that if we don’t do this but we’ll come away one morning and the branch would have broken off so we’ve had lost all of them and the tree would have been damaged.
So, I’ve just done to roll off and discount it about half of those apples so, we’ve got here about 16 right and there’s more farther up. As you can see now, these apples are more widely spread which is I’ll get more sunlight. You won’t the ear wigs breaking up. You can just see here, just about there was a couple of rose and some dead leaves, you get two or three apples or maybe even four, it was growing very close together. You’ve got a bit of dead space at the center of them and you get some debris building out and you get earwigs and earwig mass and they’ll damaged the fruits.
So again, with fruit thinning where it has to be done. It’s often said about getting two good apples instead of four bad apples because the worst case scenario is you’ve got a big heavy rope branch that’s carrying maybe 18 apples and you don’t thin it when you need to. When you come up one morning and the whole branch has snapped off.
And now you have to reduce about 16 apples down to 8 apples so that 8 good apples and we’re trying to get all of the apples that you could possibly have. Here again, that the branch being broken but a sure waste and you see this is still pretty good crop then.
And just close in here, Julia. I can show you similar example the same thing. Here we are and we’ve got a bunch of apples here that are close together but this one underneath is not so good. That’s a bit smaller stuff of this sort so I just twist that off. You notice that one sunk down slightly because the uppermost is supporting it. I’m going to tie that one off to but it’s just full enough.
Let’s reduce them five apples down to three. There will have three good apples instead of five to make it possible. And again here, if you looked at this, this is a bit of damaged at the bottom end but I will not show what sort of pest are inside that’s done that but this apple has been damaged at the base and it will probably rot later on.
So, again I’m just twisting and often discarding it. And so that’s reduced to two to one. This one will grow nicely but this apple you see, that probably wasn’t going to do so well.
So again, some are pruning, the most of it is really done late May or early June but it’s really worth going over your apples in July, just to remove any bad apples, remove apples which are grossly overcrowded and removed apples which are so heavy on the branch where the branch is likely to break. And the same is true but even more so for plums.
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