vitog, in your recent post re. Kiwi plants you wrote: “My only complaint is that it bears too heavily, which affects the size of the individual fruits. I've been experimenting with different cultural practices to reduce the quantity of fruits.” I am very interested in your experiments to reduce the quantity. The main problem with my fruit trees and bushes is that they are always overloaded with fruit. I attribute this to the chemical composition of my soil and to the abundance of pollinators. I practice biomimicry in my gardening so the use of synthetic fertilizers to change the soil chemistry is a big NO NO for me. Of course I will not use pesticides to reduce the number of insects, either. Is there any other way to reduce quantity of fruit besides manual thinning?
Re: A question for vitog I agree that manual thinning is not fun. I think that the best method is to prune out some of the fruit-bearing branches. Figuring out how much bearing wood to remove is the hard part. That's where I'm currently experimenting: trying to remove enough blossoms to encourage larger fruits without reducing the overall weight of the crop. I'm trying this with blueberry bushes and one sweet cherry tree, as well as the Kiwi plant. Some of the pruning is done during the dormant season, with additional pruning when the blossoms are visible. The blueberries even get pruned some more after setting fruit, if there appears to be too much.
Re: A question for vitog Manual thinning works well in case of big fruit and not too big trees. I've got used to removing manually more than 90% of pears from my Pear tree. It is more tedious with plums and almost impossible to do with cherries. I don't even consider thinning my berry bushes. I have been thinking of pruning to reduce the number of fruit, but didn't try it yet. Don't want just to reduce the number of branches when having remaining ones still, or even more, overloaded. Your advice to do some of the pruning when the blossoms are already visible or even after the fruit is set sounds interesting. Thanks vitog for that.
