Property News · June 26, 2016

Fruit trees: to thin or not to thin?


Snip off a plant’s young fruitlets and you may raise your fruits’ sugar content and improve their sizeI am fascinated by old gardening books. The dusty pages, the tannic smell, the weird and wonderful language, but most of all the quirky tips and advice. Yet as a botanist I can’t help but read them with equal parts captivation and scepticism. Many of the most popular and enduring traditional practices have been disproven over the years, while in some cases science has found measurable benefits. Nowhere is this more apparent than fruit thinning – a simple trick that can dramatically transform the quality of your harvest with a few snips of the secateurs.Now is the perfect time to be fruit thinning, although I still find some elements of the concept vague. For example, what do horticulturists mean by fruit “quality”? For years I have read about snipping off the immature fruit in late June to improve this mystical attribute, but no books ever explain what this actually means. The laws of basic biology state that lopping off a large proportion of the fruitlets that have just begun to swell can make each of the remaining ones significantly larger and therefore, by extension, potentially more evenly formed. Less, it has been proven, is more – the energies of the plant aren’t split between quite as many investments. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Fruit trees: to thin or not to thin?

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