As an aside, we’ve under-thinned whole rows of peach trees before. When we started getting smaller sub-standard fruit, we’ve done what I term an “emergency” late thinning, where we thinned pretty late when the peaches were golf ball sized.
Size improved some, I think, but the quality of the flavor vastly improved, imo, which what was I was mostly after.
Not trying to sound high brow, but even me who relies on size and flavor to sell fruit to my local repeat customers, sometimes under-thin (sometimes embarrassingly under-thin as I instruct employees in real time) but we’ve been able to work around it most of the time, to make it work out decently. But it requires me to pay attention closely as the fruit comes off the trees every day.
@alan and @Olpea: What would you consider the correct time to thin? How about to thin by pruning? That way I can plan better in the future. I’m sure I’m already behind!
Also, when you thin, do you put all the thinned fruit in a bucket or let it fall on the ground? I am dealing with a large number of trees and while I try to pick up dropped fruit it just seems unrealistic.
For the flat wonderful pictured below, half of the thinning that I’ve done has been hitting the branches and the little undersized fruits fall off. That isn’t working on the other peaches, sadly.
I have read that I should be done with thinning before pit hardening which seems a bit optimistic to me. My understanding is that that “pit hardening” is 20 days after bloom (20 days after bloom was last week at my house). That seems awfully early. We sometimes have May frosts.
It sounds like golf-ball sized is “late thinning”.
My peaches are smaller than golf ball - perhaps 1" in their longest dimension. Here is a flat wonderful and some other peach that is not flat
As an aside, a bunch of the flat wonderful have a split in the bottom like the one pictured. I’ve been removing them. I cut one open and it looks totally normal inside (as do the tiny ones that didn’t size up- one in background of pic). Any idea on why they do that?
For us, the best most productive time to thin is after all the button fruit either falls off or quits growing. This generally occurs when the fruit is bigger than thumbnail size.
Some folks blossom thin, which is way to early for us, because of spring frosts.
Yes, pruning can do a good job of removing fruit quickly. We many times do both at the same time.
We don’t pick up any thinned fruit. It looks like rained peaches after thinning when we get a good year with a lot of fruit set. The small thinned fruitlets disappear pretty quickly.
That’s very common with the NJ flat peaches. They just grow too fast many times so the flesh pulls away from the pit causing those obnoxious cracks. We try to remove those as well. There’s not a whole lot one can do about it. Make sure you don’t thin those donut peaches too early. A heavier crop load early on will slow the peach grow some and prevent some split pits, but as I mentioned, flat peaches out of NJ are especially prone to that.
Donut peaches in general hang really hard on the trees, as you’ve discovered. They take more force to thin. The small donut peach in the background of your pic is possibly a button fruit and will fall off anyway. Some small fruit go ahead and keep growing, but a good number are button fruit and will be aborted.
