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  • From: Steve <sdw12986@aol.com>
  • To: NAFEx <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] How not to thin apples
  • Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:28:03 -0400


This afternoon, I was looking up in a pear tree wishing I had a way to thin the fruit way up high. I went in ad got my WOLF Garten fruit picker to see what I could do. It looks like this:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41CQMFDWETL._SL500_AA280_.jpg
There is a sharp blade between the center fingers and I thought maybe I could pop off some small fruits. It didn't work well. More often than not, it pulled off the entire spur with all the little pears.

One more try.... Years ago I grafted Arlet to the top of an apple tree. It turned out not to be Arlet. Two springs ago, I got some Arlet scion wood from a different source and tried to correct the mistake. I sawed off the "not Arlet" just above a side branch and did a bark graft with the (hopefully) real Arlet. I left the side branch thinking it would help heal the cut surface.
Two years later, the graft had 2 stems growing. I left them both for now, again to get more growth to heal over the cut surface. The small part was trying to grow several apples. I did want to try them to confirm I had the real Arlet this time but I only needed 2 or 3.
So there I am with my fruit picker trying to pluck off most of the apples and leave a few. *Ripp* I pulled the whole graft away from the wood leaving it hanging by mostly bark. Crap! I ran for a ladder, some masking tape, and the pruners. I cut off all the apples, in fact the entire branch that had them. The other lead was the one I wanted to keep in the long run anyway and I cut that one back quite a bit too. I wrapped masking tape around the injured area to hold it back in place. I got a length of bamboo stake and used that as a brace, holding that with more wraps of masking tape. Now we'll see if it grows or wilts.

Two things keep this from being entirely disgusting:
1. If I had left well enough alone and did nothing today, the weight of the apples and some wind would have broken it the same way later this summer (I bet) and I wouldn't have been right there to try to fix it.
2. I grafted a side branch on a different tree with the same scion wood. That was a splice graft and it grew far better than the bark graft. It has a few apples too so I will still get to sample the apples from the new scion this year.

Steve in the Adriondacks



  • [NAFEX] How not to thin apples, Steve, 07/05/2009

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