Author Topic: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?  (Read 4126 times)

mangomandan

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Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« on: April 26, 2015, 09:18:58 AM »
My Rosigold and Sweet Tart mango trees set lots of fruit, and seem to hold on to it.
Actually, the same goes for my Alano sapodilla.

Has anyone tried thinning the young fruit, to achieve larger fruit size?
Were you happy with your results?

ben mango

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2015, 09:39:50 AM »
I've read that some jackfruit farmers in India do this, but not sure if they do it with mango

simon_grow

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2015, 10:55:20 AM »
I thin all my fruit trees that bear heavily and I even thin trees that don't bear heavily. I've been doing this for many years now and definitely notice an increase in fruit size, increase in sugar levels and quality of the fruit and I've also noticed that my fruit trees that are heavily thinned will bear nearly every year. In other words, I've noticed that heavy thinning will INHIBIT ALTERNATE BEARING! Sorry for the caps but I felt it was that important.

Some of the plants I thinned and noticed these benefits are Loquat, citrus, Longan, Asian Pear, apples, peaches. Pretty much everything I can think of. I grow my fruit and veggies in the Jalanese style of careful and thoughtful thinning of fruit in order to get a few extremely high quality fruit instead of many regular quality fruit. By heavy thinning at the appropriate size, depends on type of fruit, you focus all the energy into a few fruit that are much larger, sometimes double the size of normal but more importantly the quality increases. By quality, I mean that the fruit are noticeably sweeter and has more flesh compared to the amount of seeds inside. For example, if you thin Longan when they are pea sized, the remaining fruit are about double the size of normal yet the seed size is about the same and you have relatively less skin to flesh ratio. If you think about it another way, the surface area of a few large balls is less than the surface area of many small balls. Surface area meaning skin or peel. Heavy thinning also allows me to bag my fruit easier since there is much less fruit to bag and protect. When thinning fruit, I usually remove about 1/2 to 2/3 of the fruit.

One of the major benefits I've noticed on certain trees is that my heavy thinning seems to decrease alternate bearing. My mother in law didn't thin her Satsuma tangerines and she would get extremely heavy harvests of tangerines one year and very few to none the next year. The quality of the fruit was also not the best when she didn't thin. Now that she's thinning the fruit, she gets fruit every year and the fruit is better in quality.

Similar to fruit thinning, I also remove the first several fruit from my veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers in order to direct more energy back to the plant so that it can establish a strong enough scaffold to later hold larger yields. Many plants, peppers for example will fruit when very small, maybe 8 inches tall or so. If you let the plant hold fruit, much of the energy will be diverted from growing the plant larger and the energy will instead go into enlarging the fruit. If you remove the fruit until the plant is much larger, the plant will have much more leaves for photosynthesis and will then be able to hold and ripen much more fruit and the fruit will also grow larger faster.

Simon

LivingParadise

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2015, 11:17:05 AM »
I thin most of my fruits, and some of my vegetables. It makes a definite difference. Most of my fruit trees are not old enough to be heavily-bearing yet, but even in cases of only a few fruits it is helpful for larger, healthier fruit. Producing so much at one time is very taxing on a tree, and while usually they are able to make a selection themselves of who survives when resources are scarce, when they are getting special attention like extra water or nutrients, they can't really make a good choice and put energy all over the place. If you prefer quantity over quality, that might be perfectly fine, or if you just like small fruits. But I have noticed that the more I thin out fruit, the better the resulting ones taste, and the larger they are.

Some of the most striking changes I have seen in loquat, and in barbados cherry. The loquat resulted in fruit twice the size, after thinning by half. In the barbados cherry, the change was amazing - after both pruning the shrubs of several significant limbs (I am shaping them to appear like trees rather than shrub-like), and cutting back unnecessary fruit, the leaves themselves became twice the size, and the shrubs started pushing flowers profusely. The fruit did not come out that much bigger, but were tastier, and the plants kept trying to put out more fruit the more I would remove. So thinning definitely does make a difference for plants. In tomatoes and peppers, I have seen that thinning results in bigger and often stronger-tasting fruit. It is similar for types of lettuces, as well as for herbs - if you trim back some leaves, the rest get much bigger, tend to have deeper color, and better taste. But there's less, so it's a trade-off of course.

I did the same with mangoes, but at this time they are still small, so I only have limited personal experience of the effects. In this year, as soon as I cut back fruits (I started with about 50), the remaining ones got quickly much larger, because all of the plant's energy could go into fewer fruits. I cut them down to 7, and ultimately just 2 mangoes, which so far look very healthy. Naturally it's not necessary to be this drastic with an older tree, but since this is the first year of fruiting many would argue it's best to remove all fruit entirely so the tree can better establish. And I would... but I don't want to wait a whole other year to try the first mangoes! :)

I have a Hasya Sapodilla, and this is its first year to fruit. It has put out what appears to be over 100 fruits! There is no way this young tree can support all that, so if it does not weed almost all of them out soon, I will have to do it for it. I haven't seen the result yet, but I would assume it would be the same, larger and healthier fruit. The tree has been ridiculously healthy despite almost no care, and I am not obsessive about sapodillas, so I probably won't thin this one as much as mangoes - I might leave as many as 15 fruit on it this year if the tree looks like it can support the weight and nutritional needs. If it's struggling, I'll twist nearly all of them off.
« Last Edit: April 26, 2015, 11:21:19 AM by LivingParadise »

cmichael258

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #4 on: April 26, 2015, 11:20:33 AM »
My Kent is 17 years old so I let it make the decision.
Michael

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #5 on: April 26, 2015, 02:19:23 PM »
I thin all my fruit trees that bear heavily and I even thin trees that don't bear heavily. I've been doing this for many years now and definitely notice an increase in fruit size, increase in sugar levels and quality of the fruit and I've also noticed that my fruit trees that are heavily thinned will bear nearly every year. In other words, I've noticed that heavy thinning will INHIBIT ALTERNATE BEARING! Sorry for the caps but I felt it was that important.

Some of the plants I thinned and noticed these benefits are Loquat, citrus, Longan, Asian Pear, apples, peaches. Pretty much everything I can think of. I grow my fruit and veggies in the Jalanese style of careful and thoughtful thinning of fruit in order to get a few extremely high quality fruit instead of many regular quality fruit. By heavy thinning at the appropriate size, depends on type of fruit, you focus all the energy into a few fruit that are much larger, sometimes double the size of normal but more importantly the quality increases. By quality, I mean that the fruit are noticeably sweeter and has more flesh compared to the amount of seeds inside. For example, if you thin Longan when they are pea sized, the remaining fruit are about double the size of normal yet the seed size is about the same and you have relatively less skin to flesh ratio. If you think about it another way, the surface area of a few large balls is less than the surface area of many small balls. Surface area meaning skin or peel. Heavy thinning also allows me to bag my fruit easier since there is much less fruit to bag and protect. When thinning fruit, I usually remove about 1/2 to 2/3 of the fruit.

One of the major benefits I've noticed on certain trees is that my heavy thinning seems to decrease alternate bearing. My mother in law didn't thin her Satsuma tangerines and she would get extremely heavy harvests of tangerines one year and very few to none the next year. The quality of the fruit was also not the best when she didn't thin. Now that she's thinning the fruit, she gets fruit every year and the fruit is better in quality.

Similar to fruit thinning, I also remove the first several fruit from my veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers in order to direct more energy back to the plant so that it can establish a strong enough scaffold to later hold larger yields. Many plants, peppers for example will fruit when very small, maybe 8 inches tall or so. If you let the plant hold fruit, much of the energy will be diverted from growing the plant larger and the energy will instead go into enlarging the fruit. If you remove the fruit until the plant is much larger, the plant will have much more leaves for photosynthesis and will then be able to hold and ripen much more fruit and the fruit will also grow larger faster.

Simon

Great advice!  Going to thin some stuff now!

mangomandan

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #6 on: April 27, 2015, 09:28:33 AM »
Thanks for some thoughtful input.

I still have some very small fruit on Rosi (in addition to every other size).
I think I'll thin it, as my first experiment with this.

Michael, when I had a Kent I never thinned it either; it was a trouper year after year, like Keitt.

PurpleAlligator

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #7 on: April 27, 2015, 11:47:07 AM »
You should always thin longan.  Cut off 1/2 to 2/3 of each pannicle.  The fruit will be larger.  Chris Rollins mentioned in a lychee/longan presentation last year that he has seen longan trees die due to too heavy of a fruit load.

From the sea

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #8 on: April 27, 2015, 02:35:48 PM »
I do on my younger trees especially my starfruit.

TREESNMORE

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #9 on: April 27, 2015, 04:48:37 PM »
Thin the sapodilla to much fruit can break small limbs. and kill the tree from over fruiting.
Mike

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #10 on: April 27, 2015, 04:51:43 PM »
Dan - every time I've thinned a mango tree, more of the remaining ones dropped
than were intended to, so I've learned my lesson.  I don't do thinning....well occasionally
rarely..... but I will completely remove little mangoes from trees that I only want to grow
vegetatively.....

Older and wiser (:o) Gary

gnappi

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2015, 05:57:23 PM »
Nope, never did, never will.

I figure I'd rather have more smaller fruit for neighbors to steal so at least I "MAY" get some.  Bastar@S
Regards,

   Gary

behlgarden

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2015, 06:12:28 PM »
strong winds on saturday that blew away my patio furniture thinned my mangoes, decimated my fuitlets on lamb hass and did some damage to reed avocados too.

mangomandan

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Re: Thinning fruit of heavy bearers -- is anyone doing this?
« Reply #13 on: April 27, 2015, 07:50:54 PM »
That has been my fear, Gary.   I figure practicing on late-season Rosigold is a good way to try this, since I have a decent chance of getting some better mangos from my other trees.  (My LZ is not doing as well as CookieMonster's, but it is carrying a lot of fruit for a "shy bearer.")    ;D

Dan - every time I've thinned a mango tree, more of the remaining ones dropped
than were intended to, so I've learned my lesson.  I don't do thinning....well occasionally
rarely..... but I will completely remove little mangoes from trees that I only want to grow
vegetatively.....

Older and wiser (:o) Gary