Hi, all. It looks like I might have a good crop of peaches this year. I am in central SC and have red haven, early Elberta, red skin, belle of Georgia, sugar princess and white princess trees. The fruit varies in size from about the size of a small pea to the size of a nickel. I have much less on the plum trees because of late freeze but would be interested in feedback with them as well. Do you thin when fruit reaches a certain size or after “June drop” (not sure if peaches do that)? I certainly don’t want trees expending energy on fruit I’m just going to pull off but don’t want to do anything prematurely and then lose some of the crop. Thank you in advance for your advice!
Peach has no June drop. Thin them at the size of a nickel is fine. If you have a lot, leave one fruit every 8-12” would be good. It may look like you have a lot of empty space and drastic when they are small. Once they sizeup, they will look fine. It is common to thin more than one round.
I thought I thin heavily in 2-3 rounds. Still, branches broke two years in a row due to heavy fruiting.
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Thank you!
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One other question if I may: would you remove smaller fruit or larger ones?
I start as soon as I’m absolutely sure there isn’t going to be another frost.
Do u pick off the biggest or smallest fruits?
The smallest ones.bb
Thin off damaged ones first. Check carefully. Bugs are fast to puncture your fruitlets. If your see any goo, ooz, jelly substance on fruitlets, take them off. Then take off twins or triplets. Then, of all clean fruitlets, take the smallest ones.
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Full disclosure, I’ve only successfully grown peaches and plums for 2 years now.
My experience is that I’ve had so much fruit set that when I thin I’m just pulling off handfulls of fruit without care about size, I’m just trying to get the excess off the tree. I usually have to go back 2-3 more times because I’m always too conservative thinning the first round. At that point I will try to leave the larger fruits, but honestly I’m not sure it matters much. The most important thing seems to be getting the spacing right.
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I have spoken to several people individually about peach thinning but I am stymied. I have had no fruit or very light fruit sets the last 4 years on my peaches. This led me to not prune some of my peach trees as much as I should. This year many of my trees set fully which is a first for me.
I have a very large Elberta that is 14 to 16 feet and probably 16 foot in spread that probably has several thousand peaches on it, and I expect I may be underestimating. Every branch is loaded with many setting multiples of three peaches at one spot. The consensus seems to be to start thinning around the size of a nickel. I have doubts that many of the peaches will reach that size. My assumption is that I should start thinning now, even though the peaches range in size from an eraser head to a dime (not many dime size)? Any chance the tree will naturally thin on its own? I have spent several hours already thinning and I doubt I have covered 2% of the tree. Any tips beyond the baseball bat technique for thinning?
Only by breaking branches off. If you leave a lot of fruit, a good chance your tree will not produce next year. Usually peaches will produce steady every year, but have noticed when I didn’t thin enough the crop is light the next year. So I thin very hard. I can’t use all those peaches anyway. Plus I will have larger sweeter peaches. You can’t thin too early as far as I know.
Keep the trees small by heavy pruning. Mine are 7 years old, and one is only 5 feet tall and puts on about 200 peaches. I try to thin to about 50. So I can just walk around them and thin. Most are kept at 7 feet. It works extremely well too, love it!
Since many of yours are big now, well not sure? Never dealt with that problem. They do make pole picking equipment, maybe look into that to keep yourself on the ground.
I think I would cut a few to 3 feet and bark graft on stump to bring the size back down. It may not work well as peaches are hard to graft, but you could add other cultivars and bring down the size of your trees. Might be worth risking a tree. I would only cut no more than 1/3 of the tree off, if not possible . Leave a feeder branch too, till the grafts take. If it doesn’t work well, only one tree will be affected.
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Spud Daddy is thinning at the right size, but understand
that peaches need to be thinned many times, because they
bloom over a long period of time. On the other hand, plums
usually self thin themselves. I never thin plums.
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I thin out roughly 75% of my peach and nectarine fruits when I have a heavy set, marble size and smaller.
Plums, I don’t thin. Low humidity here so rotting on dense fruit clusters is not an issue.
I often start thinning by pruning. Cut that tree down and open it up. You say you haven’t pruned enough. Make up for it now. You can take off at least half that way. The tree will grow back and you’ll have better fruiting wood next yr than if you don’t prune now. In summer remove the biggest water sprouts that grow back. Don’t let the bottom and middle shade out.
Then thin hard on what remains. I remove 90 to 95% when they set as heavily as yours sounds like. And yes it takes several thinnings. When you think it’s enough off take off another half. Really that’s about what it seems like to me.
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A lot of good advice here. I have one thing to add: if you get a lot of bug damage (PC,OFM,stinkbugs), go a bit easier on the thinning pace. Since I don’t use a heavy bug killer its important to take my time on thinning or I will end up with too light a crop. I have learned over the years which trees get the worst bug damage and which get very little, I thin slowly on the former and aggressively on the latter. Make sure to thin every fruitlet with worm damage, getting those baby worms out of the orchard will lower the numbers in future generations. On some varieties the early coloring fruits are telling you they have a bug in them. Pick those guys off!
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So much good advice here.
“Cut the tree down and open it up.” Steve knows what he’s talking about.
Here are some trees I pruned earlier today in my backyard. My back and foot hurt because I have injuries.
I can’t describe how bushy these trees were before the pruning. You couldn’t see through them. All the peach trees are this way before pruning. We wack the hell out of them. Notice all the shoots on the ground.
Again, these trees were twice as tall. We routinely remove 1/2 the foliage. I’m going to repeat that for emphasis. 1/2 the foliage needs to be removed yearly, for peach trees here.
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I have a peach tree which I let get large like yours. Last year it set too much fruit which I didn’t thin and the fruit never got very large. Unfortunately it went on to get brown rot which was hard to spray for as the tree was just to big for my small pump sprayer. As I embrace thinning this year I’m finding that the smaller fruit (the more yellowish) are tending to fall off easily with just a little nudge. I hope you find the same happening for you.
I hate thinning peachs! Its a very time consuming process and I have been told it requires more labor than picking the peaches for commercial growers.
Raking the limbs with a piece of PVC pipe when the fruit set is huge works well too. It’s not a selective process so you can’t choose the best peaches to keep or the perfect spacing for the peaches but it does save a lot of time. I try to make a second hand thinning pass if I have time. Also, aggressive dormant pruning really helps reduce the amount of thinning required.
I have about a dozen trees I did not get pruned and they are very tall and loaded with what looks like the thousand peaches you describe. I’m not even going to try to thin these trees which means they will produce very little fruit next year
As Rick points out, thinning is practically useless unless the tree is pruned beforehand. At this point in my experience, I wouldn’t dream of thinning a peach tree before I had pruned it. Even if you could thin an unpruned peach tree, it would still carry too many fruit for the branches to hold it. Plus all the extra unpruned shade will shade the peaches so they won’t be big, or as sweet.
One other thing to be aware of is that not all the peach fruitlets which set initially are going to become viable fruit. Some of the little fruitlets just stop growing at about thumbnail size, then eventually fall off. So, if you are thinning very early, you might leave a little extra fruit on, then come back after 3 or4 weeks when you can tell what fruit is actually going stay on the shoots. Then thin again.
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