Thinning Fruit | Naturehills.com HD

Video Transcription Let’s talk about the art of thinning – and I do mean thinning art. We’re going to talk about how to avoid diseases by thinning, how to get great size fruit by thinning, how to get great color and great sugar by thinning. Look at all this fruit. I’d love to leave every single piece, but if I do, as these fruit mature and get bigger, they’ll cut off air circulating around the fruit. That will open up this fruit for disease later on in the season. Also as these fruit mature, and they’re so close together, it’ll not allow the fruit to size as big as they possibly can. And last, if your fruit is so close together, the sun will have trouble penetrating in to give the fruit its beautiful color and sugar. First, the idea is to space the fruit so that the limb it’s on can actually sustain the weight of it as the fruit gets larger. My rule of thumb is a fist with your thumb and pinky spread out. But in my prunings, I keep the tree very, very low. As you can see, this tree is basically about 6 feet tall. That means that the laterals are very low too, so my spacing is going to be a lot more critical on these shorter limbs. We want to remove the fruit that is on the shorter limbs, like this limb right here. This short limb doesn’t look like it will be able to support all 3 of the fruit that are hanging on it right now. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to eliminate 1 and 2, and we’re going to leave just 1 because it looks like that short limb will only be able to support that 1 piece of fruit. Here’s another shorter limb right here. On this limb we see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, there are 8 pieces of fruit on a limb that’s no longer than 6 inches long. So we know that if we let 8 pieces of fruit stay on this limb, there’s probably going to be problems. One in sizing, and two in the limb breaking under the pressure of all this fruit hanging. On this limb right here, I may very well leave 2 pieces of fruit. I’m going to take out this overlapping piece right here by pulling up on the stem and pulling it off. I’m going to take this one off. I love the size of that one right there, so I’m going to keep that one and pull this one off. Then I have these 2 right here. It’s not bad to leave one right at the end, so I’m going to pull this one off right here, and then I’m going to pull that one off right there. So here we have another short limb with 4 pieces of fruit hanging on there. I’m just going to take and pull that up. This one right here I have to be real careful because you can see that the stem is shared by these 2 pieces. That’s the one I want to leave. Sometimes you can pull up on it very gently and eliminate it that way. But another way is to take your shears, get in very carefully, and just snip it out. Now we have a great space between these 2 pieces of fruit. There you have it. The art of thinning your fruit. So we’ve covered the reasons why we thin; we thin of course to prevent disease, we thin so that we get great color,