To ensure a better fruit set on most cherries, apples and passionfruit, plant a pollinating variety or in the case of apples and cherries, you may also bud one onto your existing tree. To identify pollinating varieties, check Sunset, Horticultural Publishers or Ortho books on fruit gardening for that information, refer to the UC California Backyard Orchard website, or call the Master Gardener hotline at (408) 282-3105.

To proactively manage the common and devastating bacterial disease Fireblight, which causes blackened twigs on most pears and some apples, from petals fall throughout the summer, read on. If we continue to have precipitation during April and into May when apples and pears are blooming, it would be very helpful to apply a prophylactic spray of a tri-basic copper sulfate, such as Microcop with a spreader sticker, at full bloom. Apply early in the morning before pollinating insects are present, because, although the residue will not harm the insects, a full body drench in copper would.

If you typically have had an intolerable level of wormy fruit or holes and frass in your apples and pears, you can minimize this pest by picking up and removing from your yard any early fruits that fall because wormy fruit usually falls prematurely . Leaving early falls on the ground, allows the codling moth to pupate in the soil and reinfest your trees.

There is still time to do fruit thinning and begin "summer" pruning. It is very important to thin, apricots, apples, nectarines, peaches, and pears. The rule of thumb is to thin when fruit it is the size of marbles (1/2 - 3/4 inch in diameter) and to leave a space between fruits that are the diameters of the two mature fruit if they were side by side on the branch.

This means with peaches and nectarines that you would remove enough fruit to leave a spacing between fruit of at least 6 inches. With plums or apricots, which are smaller at maturity, you would thin to 3 - 5 inches between fruit. On apples and pears, you would thin the fruit clusters to 1 - 3 fruit. Generally you don't need to thin cherries, pineapple guava, persimmons, mulberries, and cane berries.

In each situation you would try to select the best looking little fruits to remain. This would means those that look strongly attached to the branch, have good color, not yellowing (which is an indication of fruit ready to fall off on it's own) and evenly distributed up and down the branches.

If you wish to keep your fruit trees short enough to facilitate harvesting from the ground without a ladder and to reduce the, often overwhelming job of winter pruning, you might like to try "summer pruning". You prune back up to two thirds of the initial spring growth flush, which will correspond to the time you are out thinning your fruit. Then again after harvest, you would again prune back up to two thirds of the growth that occurred since the previous pruning. This should allow you to keep any standard or semi-dwarf fruit tree to 8 feet or less.

By planting trees very close together or planting several trees in one hole and "summer" pruning them many more varieties can be planted than would have been possible with traditional tree spacing and one dormant winter pruning. Now, more people can enjoy year round fruit production from their own yards.

Last Updated: 22-Nov-2003