I Can't Wait for Peaches

I caught a little clip on TV about pruning your fruit trees to make the most of harvesting. This was new to me and really interesting!

I have 3 peach trees and a huge apricot tree on my property and so I usually get a pretty good harvest of fruit, if I take advantage of it.

I followed the instructions of the pruning today, and thought I'd share it with you since now's the time to do it. This goes for apples, peaches, pears and apricots too although my apricot tree is too big to prune entirely.

Look at the fruit and see how most varieties grow in clumps of several fruits together - like at least 2 or 3, but sometimes as many as 5 or 6 fruits? To make one nice, fat peach, or whatever, you need to get rid of all of the other ones. That's right - all of them. Or else, you'll have a bunch of puny little fruits instead of nice, fat ones. This is how the experts do it!

So I did it. The top pic is what I'm talking about. See how there's a couple clumps of 2, and then a few solitary ones not far away? I got rid of the solitary ones, and then left only the biggest fruit in each clump. I did this all over all 3 peach trees. Any fruits that are more than 3"-4" together should be cleared away leaving only the largest and/or healthiest.

You'd think by all the peaches I "destroyed" that I got rid of most of my harvest. But actually, there were literally tons still up there, and I'm sure that what is there now has the energy to create great fruit instead of masses of tiny ones. This is the same theory with roses or other flower varieties.Check out how many I actually pulled off though! I think this will be my best peach year yet!