The Return of the King Blossom!!


Hi Everyone,
 You may remember Brad sending an email about fruit thinning a while back. In the email he discussed apple tree buds and blossoms, as well as how and why it is necessary to "thin" the blossoms. Here is a little excerpt from the email if you didn't get a chance to read it before:

"Regardless of the number of buds (thus blossoms) a given apple tree has, we may still need to thin. Each bud has 5 blossoms, 4 in a circle and one in the middle called the king blossom. If all 5 blossoms were to set we would get 5 small apples at harvest. Ideally 1-2 apples are best for each bud depending on variety. It is difficult to go and thin trees that don’t have a lot of blossoms, but each bud will only support 1-2 fruit."

Well ... Apple season is approaching and we can finally see the result of all the hard-working fruit thinners!

This is a photograph of an apple bud taken straight off the tree. As you can see there are only three apples (ideally there should have only been 2, but one snuck through). This is the result of thinning. Had there been no blossom thinning the bud would have produced 5 small apples that would ultimately be insufficient for harvesting. If we allowed all 5 apples to grow the bud would not have been able to support them all and there wouldn't have been enough room for them to grow. You can also see that the bottom apple is larger than the other two. This is probably because the large fruit grew from the "king blossom"... the 5th blossom that grows in the the center of the other 4.

One last interesting tid-bit. It is also important to thin the fruit because bud set for next season occurs now. If each bud produced its full potential of 5 fruit, then the tree would think it no longer needed to produce more blossoms for next year! So we thin the blossoms to, in a way, trick the tree into setting more blossoms for next seasons harvest.

Okay, that's all for now!

-B