2003-04-26 - 9:08 p.m.
Just getting in from a long day. We've been thinning apples and peaches most of the day. Now thinning is a job that just doesn't seem right. Basically thinning is plucking young immature fruit off the tree, lots of it! The trees really set fruit well this year and if you leave it all on the tree you wind up with lots of small tasteless fruit that weigh down the branches so much many break. The solution is thinning, either hand thinning or chemical thinning. We generally wind up hand thinning which is just a fancy name for picking off fruit. On the peach trees this year we thinned off about 75 percent of the fruit and there is still too much left.
That's the thing about thinning, you don't want to overthin so you don't do enough and have to come back later and do some more. When the fruit is about dime size like it is now you think surely the fruit is far enough apart so you stop thinning. Then the fruit goes to growing and you say to yourself, "Now where did all that fruit come from?" and you have to take more off. Some of the best crops I ever had are when a late frost came through and froze about 70 percent of the young fruit before we had thinned. I swore the crop was about ruined. The fruit that was left looked too far apart, but after they grew it was just right with nice big fruit. Have a nice Sunday.
