36 
THINNING— CRABAPPLES 
is better to do it when the apples are about 1 inch in diameter. If you do 
not take off enough the first time, thin again later on. 
A tree can produce a certain number of bushels of fruit, and if you 
thin, the remaining apples will be larger, so you will get just as much 
fruit as if j'ou did not thin. If the tree overbears, it will not only hurt 
the quality of the fruit, but the tree may be so weakened that it will bear 
little or no fruit the next year. 
The apples are borne on small "fruit spurs." These spurs only bear 
every other year; therefore, if you allow them all to bear one year, none 
of them produce fruit the next year. 
Remove all imperfect or wormy apples and carry them from the 
orchard. Feed them to the hogs or destroy them. Do not allow any 
clusters to remain, but only one apple to the spur. A general rule is to 
remove all the remaining apples so they are 6 to 10 inches apart on 
the branches. 
A young vigorous tree seldom needs thinning. The amount of the 
crop can be controlled to a certain extent by pruning out a part of the 
surplus wood. After it is ten years old, however, the fruit should be 
thinned every year. The amount of fruit that a ten-year-old tree can 
bear depends on its size, vigor, and variety, but it is somewhere in the 
neighborhood of ten bushels. No hard-and-fast rules can be given, as 
the amount of thinning depends on the conditions. 
Borers: There are two kinds of apple borers. They are a different 
insect from the peach borer, but the treatment is the same. (See page 47; 
Spraying, see page 73.) 
Crabapples 
Crabapples are exceptionally hardy and for that reason are planted 
in some sections where other fruits can not be grown, but they are gen- 
erally adaptable like the other apples, and the method of planting and 
growing is practically the same. 
They can be planted several feet closer than other apples, but it 
does not pay to break up the uniformity of the orchard by having one 
narrow row of crabapples. 
Burbank Plum trees. North Manltou Island. Michigan, average bve baskets 
of plums per tree, which sold at $1.25 per basket on the Chicago markets. 
Pear 
The pear is closely related to the apple, and is treated in pretty much 
the same way. Pears are successful in the northern half of the United 
