Thinning Peaches for Productivity and Delicious Fruit

Herb Farmer Jay here. Today I'm going to talk to you about how to get sizable fruit off of your peach tree. Thinning fruit is one of the things you need to do and do well to get the sizable fruit that you need. If you look at this tree right here, this is just budding out early and getting ready to blossom here in the early spring. And you can see there's going to be plenty of fruit on this tree, plenty of blossoms that are going to come out. More than the tree can actually bring to full maturity or the sweetness we want. So a couple of little principles to keep in mind about thinning and why it's important to do it. Keep in mind that a tree is a solar collector. What it's doing is converting the sun's energy through photosynthesis into the materials that the tree needs for all of its life functions as well as fruit production. Well, to get the sweetness in the peaches that you need, you've got to have a good ratio of leaves per piece of fruit for two things. One, to plump up the fruit. Number two, to put the sugar into it. If there's no sugar in it, you can get a really nice fruit, but it just tastes blah. So to get that nice, sweet, juicy peach that you're dreaming of, you're going to have to reduce the amount of fruit that's on the tree. Now, it's interesting to note that almost all fruit trees overproduce fruit. Because think what the tree is trying to accomplish. It's thinking about the next generation. It's trying to produce more seeds, pits, that will grow further trees. You, as the orchardist, are wanting to grow nice fruit, so what you're going to have to do is thin the fruit out. Now, we'll show this as this progresses a little bit along the way, but here early in the season, you can see lots of blooms on this tree. And these are all going to create into small, little peaches that we're going to come back and thin out when they're about the size of a marble. No bigger than a dime. Pea-sized to a marble is perfect when we come back and thin them. We want to do it that early so the tree does not invest any more energy than it needs just to get a good fruit set and to give us what we need to look at to determine whether or not that's a piece of fruit we want to keep. The end goal, we're going to produce these spacings on the tree of approximately that far apart, about six inches apart per piece of fruit. You look at that and say, gee, I can't do that because that's not going to be much fruit. On a tree this size, I'll probably end up with 75 to 80 peaches, maybe even a little bit more at that spacing. But here's the cool thing. Those peaches will be at least that big and in some cases that big. Now what would you rather have? Would you rather have 200 to 300 little hard fruits about that big, great color, but not necessarily that sweet, a lot of processing, mostly pit? Or would you have less, let's say 75, that are beautiful, bright, sweet, ready to do whatever you want to do with them, whether it's slicing fresh or canning them, freezing them, making that peach pie, whatever it is you're dreaming of. All right, stand by and we'll be back in just a flash of the camera and we'll see when it's time to thin. Thanks for watching.