How to Thin A Fruit Tree

Tom: Oh, we’ve been inside all season. The weather hasn’t been that good. It’s a nice day outside. Ed: Yeah, you bet. It’s been so cold. I bet there’s a heck of a fruit set up on those trees. We probably need to be taking a good close look at them. Tom: I think we need to go out and do some thinning today. Ed: I think you’re right, Tom. Let’s go. Backyard Orchard Culture How to Thin Your Fruit Tree This is one of our hedgerows at Dave Wilson Nursery experimental orchard. This is about 10 trees planted on 36 inch centers so it’s about a 30 foot row. We have apricots. We have peaches. We have nectarines. We have plums and plouts. These trees are 15 years old. They were planted back in 1993. Let’s take a look at spring maintenance and how we would go about thinning and caring for these trees for the season. This is a Mariposa plum, real precocious variety in this area such lots of fruits but definitely it’s going to require some thinning. We’ve got too much of fruit on here. So, we’re going to look at our clusters and we’re going to thin all the small fruit out first. We’re going to try and thin those clusters down to one or two fruit and then maybe one or two fruits every 4 to 6 inches. Now, that we finish thinning our Mariposa plum, let’s look at the second tree in the second hedgerow. It’s a Santa Rosa plum and even though it’s grafted under the same Myrobalan rootstock, the Santa Rosa is a lot more vigorous than the Mariposa. So, we’re going to need to do some topping along with thinning on the Santa Rosa. The Santa Rosa plum is a little dense in the center so we’re going to take a look at opening it up a little bit. We’re going to look for any problems, any dead fruit or broken branches. We’re going to try and open it up a bit for light exposure and just get the air movement working so that the fruit will ripen out more uniformly. Here it is. It’s thinned. It’s size-controlled. It’s ready for the season. The fruits are going to ripen out uniformly. I can reach every branch on the tree right from standing on the ground. Here’s a planting of the tree in one hole, along with apricot and along with peach and a double delight nectarine. So, we’ve got a pretty heavy set on this, blend of this apricot this year. Let’s see what we can do to help it to keep it from having problems later on and have the best possible fruit in can. Alright, once again we’re going to take this fruit down to about one per every fist or 8 to 10 inches whichever you prefer. For this heavy fruit load, we have here and bean apricot, I’m going to take it down to about a fist-size just between them. Here we are in early April with flavored delight aprium. It’s that plum-apricot hybrid that has just a little bit of plum parentage in the apricot. It gives it lots of adaptability to all sorts of diverse climates. As you can see, it’s a producing fool. We call this tree a branch breaker. If you don’t thin, it’s going to self-destruct itself so much fruit. As a rule of thumb for thinning, you want one fruit about every 8 to 12 inches. That’s for commercial stunners. For home use, you may not want to go quite that much so let’s just start by thinning our clusters. We’re going to thin all of our clusters down to one nice size fruit and we’re going to put up at least a piece worth of space in between and go back and continue thinning. Something likes that, it looks harsh but that’s where you’re going to get some nice, good size, beautiful fruit. We found some plouts to thin. So, it looks like a Flavor Supreme plout. It won’t be great unless we can get this fruit cluster, thinned out so that it can mature to be as good as it possibly can be. This isn’t just the “peace” sign. This is the “V” for victory. The victory you’re growing perpendicular “V” style fruit trees. These are two-in-one multiple budded trees grown as a perpendicular “V”, one variety on each side of the tree so when the space of 11 trees, we have 22 varieties of fruit. How about a raised bed with 6 trees in one hole? This is about as special as you can get but it has a purpose. Its purpose is for good drainage soil, get the roots out above the soil line, and provide more oxygen available to the root system. These thrive in this heavy, heavy soil in them.