There's a lot of advice around about thinning your apple crop to ensure
a crop of sensible sized fruit and to prevent biennial bearing.

One suggestion is that each fruit should be at least 4 inches away from
any other. So this implies that clusters be thinned down to just one
fruit?

My Ashmead's Kernal has a lot of the fruit in big clusters typically a
foot or more apart.

Surely what matters is the total number of fruits for the size of the
tree rather than how far apart fruit is from other fruit?

Steve Harris - Cheltenham - Real address steve AT netservs DOT com
A useful bit of gardening software at http://www.netservs.com/garden/