Unless there is seriously threatening weather, you can’t start too early. If anything, nickel size is almost too late.
As one of the earlier posters said, do it in waves, starting with the corroded-looking fruit. That’s a psychological thing as much as a strategic thing. BB size isn’t too small to start. Doubles, insect damage, obviously heavy sets in small areas.
Since you are behind the curve, I would simply go after it hammer and tong. Eight inches between fruits is plenty close. The reality is that you will almost certainly under thin. That’s just human nature. Go for it as best you can.
Just finished the first thinning pass on my Contender peaches using a 5 foot piece of PVC pipe to rake the branches or bang the scaffolds and I wanted to offer a few comments while its fresh in my mind. Raking with the pipe seems to work better than hitting the scaffolds with a baseball bat.
This method only makes sense when the trees experience a severe over set of fruit and no better alternative exist. It’s an attempt to insure satisfactory production of sell-able quality peaches as opposed to over-cropping the trees, getting no quality peaches, risking the health of the tree and most likely just a few peaches next year. It’s a profit maximizing action for my situation considering the value of my time and the number of trees that have to be thinned but not a universal recommendation.
I thinned 8 Contender trees today in about an hour. Looks like I knocked about 5 peaches per square foot on the ground or about 750 peaches per tree. I will follow up with another pass with the PVC pipe followed by a final hand thinning pass. My other high chill hour peach which is Red Haven is very over set too and will get the same treatment. The other peach varieties don’t have as many peaches and don’t need such radical thinning. Rich May which is an early low chill hour peach only has a small crop.
A lot more effort on my part would probably improve my quality but not my sales of profit. Growing peaches takes a lot more time than I expected when I planted the trees about 8 years ago, but they are a lot easier to grow than apples in my area.
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