I’m sure everyone has been thinking of doing that but I haven’t seen any posts about it so I decided to share my experience. Last year I waited for a nice hail to hit before thinning my largest apple tree (Gala). It also happens to be large enough to make thinning pretty uncomfortable so I figured I’ll save some time and effort at the same time.
On the side from which the hail was hitting there were almost no surviving apples while on the lee side most apples managed to hang on. I wanted to check if nutrients and energy would just go to the one scaffold that had lots of apples from the other scaffolds that had almost no apples.
I thinned half as much as I normally would (coincidentally, just the parts that were really convenient to thin) so overall there were much fewer apples on the tree than there would be on an uscathed tree. However, most of the apples that remained were on one scaffold branch and it was very underthinned. I guess it had more than 50% excess apples compared to if all branches were thinned normally.
At the end of the year the results were very conclusive. The fruit quality of the apples was pretty bad. The quality of fruit was about what I’d expect if the whole tree was very underthinned. I am beginning to question if energy travels between scaffods at all, because there were more than enough leaves on the tree overall for perfect fruit.
Nutrient flow from the roots is also a consideration, of course. Maybe the branch wasn’t thick enough to transfer enough nutrients for all the extra apples.
I mixed all the apples I picked so I don’t know if the underthinned branches had better fruit than the overthinned branches. It could have been just a bad year for Gala.
Does anybody else have experience with underthinning parts of the tree to balance out the overthinned parts to get a larger amount of high-quality fruit?