How to quickly increase Crop Production by thinning Apples

Hey, welcome back to HuwsNursery and we're here in the orchard and my dad is going to show you basically the basics of thinning apples and why you should do it. Ok, we're in the orchard today, it's early July, so we've been waiting for the June drop for the trees to naturally thin small apples that will drop, so I've come along now to see whether some of the trusses, a truss is a group of apples like this, need thinning out. If you don't thin out your trusses then you'll get lots of small apples and also there's a tendency towards what they call biennial bearing, which means basically that you'll have a tree with a huge crop one year and no crop the other. So it's really important that if you've got a heavy crop of apples that you thin them out and select the best ones, so then rather than having loads of little ones you'll get some decent sized apples. The tools I'm going to use today, the first one is a special tool that I bought for myself, a bit of a treat, a company called Bergman Ball, a flower and fruit snip, and I bought this from a national truss shop and it's actually really good. You can also actually use a fairly stout pair of scissors as well, but you notice it's really important to be able to get in to the trusses and the sharp angle on that makes it easier than the scissors. Also you have less purchase from here, it's easier on your hand, it's a more ergonomic tool. OK, starting off, we want to get rid of any small misshapen fruit, so looking here, this one's not going to do anything, snip it back. Here we've got four apples, really we only want two, so that one's got a bit of damage on it, so I want to get rid of that, and look around, that's a nice big one, so I'll take out that one again because it's split because of the amount of rain that we suddenly had after a long dry spell. OK, so we've got two apples left in that truss, this one here, I think you can guess, will be this little one here that's got a crack in it. What I'm actually doing, you can hear me popping stuff into a bucket, none of this will get wasted, I can either boil it up and make apple puree out of it, or juice it, but at this time of year, these will be really sharp, so I'll have to add quite a bit of sugar to them, but nothing goes to waste. And then, once we've done that, that'll go to our pigs. Looking at this truss, take that one out, sometimes you find some that have got some damage on anyway, and it's good to take those out, this little pathetic one, and if you can see there, we've got that, and there's one smaller one in the back which has actually come off by itself. So we've started doing that, this one, and then you find little baby ones like that, they'll just come off, usually just by doing that, they're the ones that haven't quite come off during the June drop, because we haven't had a very strong wind. If you look up higher into the tree, you can see that there's still a fair bit of work to be done. So basically, we've now done this branch, and thinned it down to two per truss, and then that should mean, as I go around and do the rest of the tree, that we'll get a good crop of decent sized apples this year.