Thinning Fruit Trees

Like pruning, thinning is another important aspect to the art form that is orcharding. How and when you choose to remove fruit in late spring will determine how well the harvest will be and also next year’s fruiting potential.

There are recommended ways to care for your fruit trees. But in the end, growing fruit trees is a long term commitment, one forged through seasons of trial and error.

The biggest reasons you want to thin your fruit trees are:

1. To ensure the best quality fruit
2. To ensure the tree has energy left to produce fruit buds for next year
3. To minimize the weight of the fruit on branches to prevent branches from breaking

It’s especially important for open grown dwarf trees to thin your fruit every year.

June Drop

Apples will drop some fruit naturally, but you’ll need to take an active hand in removing more than what they will drop on their own.

Plums, peaches, and apricots will drop fruit on their own. This is known as June drop.

Practice not Perfection

Learning how to care for your fruit trees is a years-long endeavor. You’ll see in this video John continues to “break the rules” when it comes to how far apart to space your thinned fruit.

Many university extension resources say to thin to 6″ between fruit, or one fruit per fruiting spur. For our haralson this year, there were SO many blossoms and fruit that we ended up with more like 1 fruit for every 4″ or so.

And on other trees that had little fruit, John didn’t even knock any fruit off, confident that the fruit load wasn’t too heavy for the plant to carry or for it to have enough resources to develop fruiting buds for 2026.

But of course, time will tell!