Constant reminders to thin


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Been there… Done that!

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I don’t understand. Can you explain please?

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They left too much fruit on the tree and the limb broke off. The black stuff is sealant to help heal the wound left from the branch breaking off.

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“Been there, done that”, twice :confounded: (I’m a slow learner).

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Also reminder to not leave crotches with included bark.

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Thinning can be tedious but I try to be diligent. It’s a big reason that I aim to have smaller trees, pruned or trained in shapes that are easily accessible without a ladder. I think good thinning means bigger, better tasting, earlier fruits, as well as fewer broken branches. It’s also kind of peaceful work, like meditation.

I already have plums that need thinning soon, and it’s still April! Imagine that!

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That’s gnarly! I just took off a large branch from my sister’s apple tree after watching skillcults bark inclusion video. Is the tree still performing well or is it a mortal wound?

No, it’s still going, but it’s certainly slowed down. I think this year I’m not going to let any peaches grow on it, so it can concentrate on growing back to health.

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Don’t know what you.mean.

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I did that ( or didn’t thin actually) on my peach tree three years ago. The fruit was very very small and I was waiting until they got a little bigger so I could pick and choose which ones to thin. Well, one huge rainstorm over two days and the small peaches grew a lot bigger and broke off a nice big limb. Lesson learned ( or so I say so far). I just hate to thin the fruit, I know I am supposed to. It just feels like I am taking off the majority of fruit.

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Looks like the wound is where a big branch with a narrow crotch attachd to the trunk, and at the top there was included bark, a week connection:
image

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Mike,
“It just feel like I am taking off the majority of the fruit”. You are :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

At least, peaches do not go biennial. Wait until you have to thin Asian pears. You will have to thin out 80% of the fruitlets for the remaining fruit to size up well, improve their quality and prevent biennialing.

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I see what you mean now. The scion was much smaller than the tree when I grafted it. I never noticed this before, but I think the graft must have grown larger than the trunk!

I thin mine to about the width of my fist apart. That can mean removing all of the fruitlets from multiple clusters, for apples and pears. For plums, maybe half that distance. It is removing the majority of fruit but that results in better fruit in the end.

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Was grafting/wound sealer used immediately after the limb was severed on the bottom photo? Or was it used at all?

So should I thin this Lapins cherry?

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In my experience, they will “ self-thin” as in each cluster, some of them will turn brown and drop.

When my cherry tree sets heavily one year, it will set lightly the following year. Thinning may help prevent that but I have not thinned mine.

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Lookslike that’s already starting

My rule for thinning stone fruit is to keep the fruits from touching

That’s what I wanted to hear! Since there are about a dozen such branches.