Fruit thinning
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It may seem strange to cut off some, or even most, of your baby
fruitlets, but experience shows that it is often essential. Basically,
some trees some years set more fruit than suits you. It may suit the
tree, which only needs to reproduce itself once or twice in a lifetime,
but YOU and your friends and customers want a reliable annual crop of
apples which are the 'right' size. removing excess fruitlets in early
summer is an extremely useful exercise which we find indispensable for
some varieties. Sunset and Spartan always set too many fruitlets,
Winter King is even more inclined to do so-often setting 6 apples to a
cluster. I find that fruit thinning is neglected in many apple growing
books, we find it to be one of the most important annual orchard
operations, neglect of which can reduce the saleable crop by 30% or
more. Even if you are not selling, fewer bigger fruits have various
advantages, they store better for one thing and take less time to pick,
and exhaust the tree less.
The picture below shows a cluster of 7 fruitlets. If you leave them,
some may fall off, but then again they may not. If you are forced to
thin them later when they have grown, more goodness will have gone into
the apples and you will 'waste' more. Note the thin nosed
secateurs, these are made for topiary but are perfect for this job. If
you only have a few trees you can get by with ordinary secateurs or
scissors, but the right tool is best.
SNIP! One carefully placed snip with the right tool and the crowded
cluster of 7 is
reduced to a well spaced 3. Depending on the overall crop, the growing
season, health of the tree etc, this might be too many-some trees some
years should be
thinned to single fruits. you will have to make a judgement on this and
get a feel for it. Bear in mind that we have been doing this for 15
years and we have never once looked at a tree and said 'we thinned too
hard' it is always 'we should have thinned harder'. All other things
being equal, these fruits will now achieve a much better size, and
exhaust the tree less since a lot of nutrient goes into making pips-the
flesh is mostly water, sugar and flavour compounds whereas the pips are
mostly protein. See examples below showing inadequate thinning.
The above left, Red Pippin, is
not a particularly bad example, this tree was fruit
thinned, just not quite enough to get optimum apple size for market.
The apple in my hand is the normal size which sells best. If a further
1 in 3 of the apples on this part of the tree had been removed up to a
month earlier, better still 2 months, a smaller number of fruits would
have matured to the same weight of apples we have now, but they would
be of larger average size. There is nothing wrong with smaller apples,
we bag them up and sell them for children typically at about 40% of the
price we charge for 'grade A' fruit. But it is always the smaller
fruits we have left over at the end of the market. If this tree
had not
been thinned at all, as opposed to the decent but not quite adequate
thinning the results of which are seen here, you can easily appreciate
that instead of having 50 good sized apples weighing, say, 7kg on the
tree, you could have had 200 apples weighing the same 7kg, maybe a
little more, but they would be the size of golf balls which is
not what you want.
The example on the right is Sunset,
you can see the crowded cluster which has 3 undersized apples and a
tiny
one, possibly a fifth fruit at the back. Compare these to the
well-coloured (thinning allows more light in, which leads to less
disease and better colour), decent sized specimen in my hand. Sunset is
always a
small apple, if this cluster had been thinned to 1, or at most 2,
fruits, a better result would have been obtained.
Apart from the other problems I have mentioned, they
take longer to pick, also a massive number of tiny apples is more
likely to make the tree go biennial, so you have a profuse crop one
year and nothing the next. Fruit thinning is all about, my favourite
apple tree management word, balance.
One last thing, some apples have short stalks, we find Bramley, Russets
and Orleans Reinette a problem in this regard. They may grow so
tightly together in a cluster that is is impossible to get the thinning
snips in between them. The thing to do here is hold the cluster with
one hand and carefully twist off the central apple. You will then be
able to see into the centre of the cluster and snip off a few more as
required. With Bramley in particular, you should thin ideally to single
apples, never more than 2. Three Bramleys growing in a cluster will
give a home to earwigs, who don't actually eat the apple but do make a
dirty mess.
IN SUMMARY
not all trees need thinning every year
(Lord Lambourne rarely needs much thinning)
some almost always do (e.g. Spartan,
Sunset, Red Pippin, Laxton's Epicure, Winter
King)
thin when the fruitlets are the size
of marbles (e.g. about 1cm) then again if necessary when they are the
size of golf balls)
obviously, remove any deformed
fruitlets first
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