Reminder to Thin Fruit Crops

Reminder to Thin Fruit Crops

Now is the time to thin your apple crops. Apple trees produce often heavy crops. Some of the fruit will abort naturally but we still should help the tree by thinning manually. If all the fruit remains on the tree, the branches will be heavy and more likely to break. Also the fruit will be smaller as it is crowded and therefore has to compete for nutrients. Pictured is my Honeycrisp apple. I plan to thin 30% of the fruit. I recently had relatives from Holland visiting and they said they remove 50% of the fruit. I will see in the fall if my 30% was sufficient to produce nice size, healthy apples. Don’t pull on the fruit when thinning but instead use pruners for a clean snip with no pulling.