Growing good sized fruit on your new tree

How to encourage large fruit

One thing that usually shocks new tree growers is the fact that the fruit produced by their tree is often much smaller than the ones they’re used to seeing at the store or farmer's market. Is something wrong with my tree? you may wonder.

However, small fruit are a natural occurrence in a young tree. But while smaller fruits might be what nature originally intended, you can encourage your tree to give you larger fruit, without the use of any added chemicals. You just need to know a few small tricks.

Fruit thinning
Usually in the early stages of a fruit tree's growing, experienced gardeners do something called 'fruit thinning'. The theory behind this is that with less fruit to put it's energy towards, the tree will be able to more efficiently put growth into what fruit there is. When there are hundreds of immature fruit on one tree competing for the available nutrients and energy, you will most likely end up with some of the immature fruit falling off anyway before maturity, and what is left to grow will not be as large as you may have hoped.

To take care of this problem, simply pick at least a third of the fruit extremely early in the growing season. The remaining fruit should grow to a reasonable size. If it's your tree's first year, you may even want to pick all the fruit off and allow the tree to put all it's energy into growth, rather than production.

On some trees, the fruit has a tendency to grow in clusters, my lemon tree is one example. During the fruit thinning process, you would aim to remove some of the fruit in a cluster, allowing the remaining fruit more physical room. I have found that sometimes the fruit in a tight cluster will push each other further and further apart as they grow and this can cause some of the fruit to come off the branch. It also stresses the branch that they're all hanging on. Having loads of fruit starting to grow on a young tree is not always a good thing.

A more mature tree will often naturally produce larger fruit.

Photo credit morgeFile

Conditions out of your control
Sometimes, small fruit are caused by conditions out of the gardener’s control. If the weather conditions are less than ideal, this can affect the size of the fruit and if there are any fruit at all. If the weather is particularly cloudy very early in the season, or conversely, particularly hot, then fewer carbohydrates will be available to your plants. A lack of water or certain nutrients, or excessive pests and diseases can also damage the growth of flowers and fruit. If you notice these things going on early in the season, you can take steps to try and correct the.

Experiment
The best way to find out how to gain larger fruit sizes is to experiment. You can test different thinning techniques and particular combinations of nutrition, anything you can think of to produce larger fruit. You might even head down to your local nursery and ask them for advice. They will be able to give you advice based on your region and your specific tree, and recommend any products they think may be beneficial. So don’t settle with small fruits. Go out there and find out what exactly you need to do to improve the size.