The Apple Club Newsletter, Winter 2008, Page 2

Back in summer 2006 I wrote about June drop; that is apples that the tree naturally drops off in June or July. These aren’t the only apples that you might see under our trees in summertime though. With some varieties we deliberately knock off extra apples as well.
Trees of some varieties of apples like Elstar and Golden Delicious, as well as many plums, tend to produce too many fruits. If left to their own devices, you would end up with a crop far too many fruits, and each one would be too small. As well as this, the stress of carrying so many fruits can cause the tree to shut down for a year, which would mean that the following year you will see few or no fruits at all. This kind of a cycle can then become established, where every second year there are either too many fruits, or none at all.
On our farm, where we want to have a crop each year, we try to stop trees from giving too many apples in their “on” year. To do this we thin.
What this means is that in June, when the apples are still small, we walk along the trees, and knock off a proportion of the fruit using our fingers to prise them away from the buds. This can be a slow process, as sometimes a tree which should only have 80 or 100 fruits might have 400 in June. We then need to thin that tree by taking 300 off, and leaving 100 on. It can take a few minutes per tree, and we could have hundreds or even thousands of trees to thin.
When we are thinning, we try to leave the remaining fruits evenly spaced along the branches. At least 10 cm (4 inches) between each fruit would be good. We also try to remove the smallest fruits, as they are usually the weaker ones, and take off any with marks or scars, so that the best are left.
If we did not thin, we could find that branches break in the autumn, simply due to the weight of the fruits, and we would also find that fruits would not taste so well, because the trees resources are spread between too many fruits.
The fruits that we thin off are left to rot into the ground, and they do provide some nutrients for the trees, so not all is lost.
However, thinning is quite a bit of work, and your fingers can get sore after a few days. Luckily there are some varieties like Karmijn, Jonagored and Bramley that do not need thinning, so at least not every tree needs to be done. And because it is usually nice weather in June and July at thinning time, it is a great excuse to get out in the sunshine. Here’s hoping that there will be fruit to thin in 2009, and that the weather will be good for it too!

I was surprised and delighted to see an old school-friend of mine on Prime Time about two weeks ago. Kieran Hickey, who now lectures in University College Galway, was featured on Prime Time, being interviewed by Miriam O’Callaghan about the prospects of global warming. He was debating the issue with a film-maker who was critical of the idea, who argued that because scientists have made errors in the past, their predictions are also now unreliable.
Kieran did a great job in arguing his case, and he certainly did expose how far out of his depth the film-maker was. Personally speaking, I am very suspicious of people who down-play the prospects of global warming, as most who do have a vested interest in allowing the current situation to continue, whereas the scientists (whose opinion is almost universal now), have nothing to gain by telling us of the impending problems caused by greenhouse gases.
For those who don’t know Kieran, he originally hails from Church Street, Cahir, in what you may remember as Hickey’s drapery, beside Sampson’s Newsagent.

Apple thinning

The Cahir Climatologist

Newsletter Winter 2008		page 2 of 4