How many peaches should I let my 3-4 year old peach trees give?

I don’t thin my fruit but add support to limbs. My fruit ripen small with less sweetness. I end up loosing 50-100 percent of it to squirrels. If I thinned I would get none every year. The squirrels start picking about 2 months early, run off to a tree then take a bight and drop it then come down and cautiously cross the street and climb my trees to get another. It is the time lag between pickings that allows me to get any fruit so long as I don’t thin. I may have several thousand fruits and get several hundred. The squirrels eat near 0 because they don’t get ripe enough for their taste when I pick them and because squirrels don’t have window sills or brains to let their harvest ripen over a few days to weeks.

You are the only person I know of who’s claimed success by leaving surplus fruit on trees. Every site I work at either the squirrels take everything or almost nothing, no matter how much fruit there is in the trees. Last season old apple trees with literally tons of of fruit hanging from their 40’ spread lost every apple at some sites- one of them has 30 such trees on it.

The majority of the orchards I manage reliably harvest stone fruit because we install baffles to prevent the squirrels from climbing the trees. That way we don’t have to sacrifice anything to them.

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