Photo courtesy of pigpencole at Flickr.com.
Though it can be comforting to eye those weighted-down branches on your fruit trees and anticipate the harvest, the sad fact is that fruit that’s too tightly clustered on the tree can begin to rot. While there are chemical solutions to some of the factors that cause rotting, a simpler organic method is to just thin out the fruit. Apples and pears should be thinned to a spacing of 5-6 inches apart; 3-4 inches is fine for smaller fruits like apricots, while plums can be thinned down to about an inch. If you can wait until you can put these fruits to good use, that’s great; otherwise, you can give them to the squirrels and birds as a peace offering, or let them enrich your compost heap.
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