Hello. It’s the 1st of June today and it’s a good time to be doing some fruit thinning. It might seem counter intuitive but there are lots of good reasons for doing fruit thinning on many of your apple trees for many years. Not always and not every tree you need to make a judgment about pruning. But if a tree needs to have its fruit thinned and you don’t do it, you will be sorry. This is a branch of a variety called sunset closing. And I’ve counted this tree. It’s about 2 ½ feet of branch here and there is about 40 apples. But if you don’t thin these, what will happen is a couple of things. First of all, the weight of the apples will take the branch down here. And we’ll have trouble mowing it and it would be a problem and then the whole branch would be cut off next year which I don’t want to happen.
The other thing is we will get 40 small apples which would be rather deformed. What I want instead from this branch is about 12 good sized apples. So to do that, you need to remove—believe me, when I haven’t done it, I’ll find out why I need to do it. So we’re going to sort of thin it. This is a really nice purpose made tool. Now these are extremely thin. They don’t need to be terribly sharp and maybe it’s best not to have these terribly sharp because you have to work close towards your left hand if you’re right handed, so you want to be really careful. Now, I’m going to take these off. I’ll start with the underneath ones. Look at this. You can see that there are quite a few apples hanging underneath. Now these are not going to get the light and they’re too close. It would be quite radical here, which I am doing. This seems absolutely criminal with what I’m doing. Believe me, I’ve been working on this for a few years and it makes sense. So we’re taking a few right out.
Okay. Now I’m going to hone in a bit more and I’m going to thin these apples out to approximately one apple every two inches of the branch. As you can see that there, there is a little mark. I got a mark there from a biting beetle which we have a lot of problem with. That apple may not do so well, so we’ll take that one out. We’re looking for any diseased here obviously. Here, you can see a blemish there. We don’t know how it came but that apple is not going to mature to be a perfect apple. Here, that’s another one if you can see that. Obviously, you remove the very badly placed fruit. You remove the fruit that’s too close together. Here we see, there are two apples—this is what we call thinning to singles. This variety is sunset. It’s a very fertile variety and it will set too many apples every year. So, we’re thinning these to singles. The fruit bud is capable of producing up to five or even six apples. In this case, we thin to singles because this is by nature a very small fruit. You can already see what I’m doing here roughly.
There’s a foot of branch here and there are seven apples on a foot of branch. There is about one every two inches. Working further down, again, this one is underneath. I’m going to thin that to a single. This one here, we’re going to take that off to a single. Here, I’m going take that off completely. The apples which are underneath the branch, they won’t get so much light and they will not color up so well. You see what I’ve done roughly there. That’s about right. We’re just going to take that one out and that one is slightly deformed. So if you look again at the branch with how it looks now, the benefits of removing. I’ve taken about 2/3 of the fruit. I’ve taken just over half of these out. This branch still may fall down bit too low. You could if you want to to support this little system of apple tree support or may poling where you place a large stake in there at the center of the tree and tie the branches up. And that way, you can support more apples. Modern growing tends to be on trellis, post or wire with trees planted one meter apart. I don’t like the fruit that way.
So that’s simple a really quick look at fruit thinning. And with a variety like sunset or Spartan or winter king, these always set too many fruits. And if you don’t thin them, you’ll end up with a tree maybe with 400 fruits on it but none of them would be bigger than a tangerine. And if you’re particularly selling for the market, you’d rather do it with the culture with the tree because the pitch uses up a lot of energy and a lot of nitrogen. The flesh of the apple are just basically carbohydrate which is made of air, water and sunlight and a few flavor compounds. But if you let a tree carry 400 small apples, it will exhaust the tree far more than if you let it carry 150 bigger apples even if the overall weight wants the same. So, I’ve just cut off about 20 or 25 of the 40 apples that were on this branch. The weight of apples we will get off this branch will be the same and the size and the quality will be far better. So that’s apple thinning. A very necessary approach which is best done when the apples are about this size, about 1 and 1 1/12 centimeters.
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