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/

"Steve Harris" wrote in message
...
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?

Spacing them out thusly would reduce the overall number, but I see what you
mean as well and yes 2 nice fruit can grow close together in my experience
but then you need a bigger gap as it were to the next fruit.


--
Chris, West Cork, Ireland.

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?

Spacing them out thusly would reduce the overall number, but I see what you
mean as well and yes 2 nice fruit can grow close together in my experience
but then you need a bigger gap as it were to the next fruit.

Yes all these rules are meant as a sort of average. But remember the
nutrients and water for the apples has to travel along the branch
bearing the fruit so allowing loadsa fruit on one branch because the next
branch is bare, might just give small fruit - the branch might be
overloaded. Ashmead's Kernel all too easy runs to Biennial cropping - I
thin mine quite heavily in bumper years.