Better Apples And Pears

Want to grow the best-quality, large-fruited apples and pears? The secret’s in thinning out now, as Bob explains

- Bob

Right now, our apple and pear trees are likely showing the June drop, which is when a massive set of tiny fruitlets is naturally shed, and hundreds of ‘chats’ lie under each tree.

The trees ‘know’ roughly how many fruits they have reserves to ripen, so drop the surplus before these get any bigger. The important point is that this is the tree’s estimate: it wants to ripen the maximum number of seeds, and the number of fruits is almost irrelevant.

However, we want to eat the fruits, not the seeds – we don’t want lots of small seedy fruits, which is the tree’s preference. So what we do is thin the remainder heavily – this leads to far fewer fruits and equally fewer seeds.