This week I made a short video showing how to thin or prune your blossoms and fruit to promote larger, even tastier, fruit.Thinning fruit, or fruit pruning, is typically done when the tree is in blossom or when the fruit is very small. This can prevent fruit drop, remove potentially diseased fruit and can even help your tree avoid "masting". Masting is when your fruit tree has a bountiful year followed by a poor fruiting year. Its also known as Biennial Cropping.
I like to wait until the blossoms drop and fruit starts to appear. That way if pollination was poor for some reason, or a late frost nipped the blossoms reducing the percentage that will produce fruit, I don't inadvertently pull the good blossoms and leave the poor.
Along with removing all but the largest healthiest looking fruit, you can also thin the branch if fruit spurs are really close together. All of this thinning will let the tree give more of its resources to each of the remaining pieces of fruit.
I hope you can look forward to LARGE apples this year. Don't have a backyard orchard or even a fruit tree? Well now is the time to give Abundant Design a call so we can get something started for YOU!
Have a great week!
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