Gary:

There are some things that cannot be reduced to a chart, and you have found one of them. There are many factors responsible for the growth rate and final size of apples, including, but not limited to, soil, moisture, and temperatures. Apple size can vary quite a bit from year to year, even in the same orchard and on the same trees. No chart could hope to take all these factors into consideration and produce a mathematically meaningful result.

The time to become concerned is when apples color up prematurely, sometimes from insect or other damage. As long as they are still on the trees and are not highly colored, they are still growing. The rate of their growth is what it is, and there is not much you can do to control it, short of applying hormones. Their final size will depend, to a large extent, on how the rest of the season unfolds.

The good news is that smaller apples are often more flavorful. Size does not always correlate with flavor and fruit quality. A few years ago, we bought a bunch of very large Mutsu apples while visiting the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. These huge, perfect apples looked so good I couldn't resist, but they were devoid of flavor. Not nearly the sprightly Mutsu apples I grow here. I know there are wonderful apples grown in the Annapolis Valley, but these must have been treated with hormones to achieve that size.

The lesson I took away from this experience is that size is not everything, and since the backyard orchardist cannot control it anyway it is best not to worry about it.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

I wandered over to the forum to ask a question, and it would seem related to this thread, so here goes. I have a dozen apple trees that are 4 years old now, and this spring the stars were aligned and we had a very heavy fruit set - enough that I've thinned 2/3 off, leaving one every 6-8 inches and even still, the branches are bending and touching the ground - this because they are so young. The apples are all larger than an egg but smaller than a baseball size.

The fruit is coloring up quickly, and the apples are starting to taste 'ripe' - not full flavored by any means, but tasting like an apple, not a green apple.

The birds have left them largely alone but they're showing up now and starting to work on them.

So my question - in such a situation, with young trees, fragile branches, and a very heavy fruit set, would it be normal for them to ripen a full 6 weeks early? The weather has been all screwy as well, with heat wave followed by cool spell, followed by heat wave, and now down in the 40's at night.

I'm tempted to pick most of them, more so that the branches don't break. It's hard to tell if they're still gaining size or not.

David:

If your branches are seriously bending down, remove more apples whether they are edible or not. If you can eat them, all the better.

Removing 2/3 of the fruit is not enough for a young tree with a very heavy fruit set. More like 9/10 would be closer to the ideal number. On a very young tree (you don't say just how young), no cluster should be allowed to retain more than one apple, and if the clusters are too close take them all from one of the adjoining clusters.

You don't specify the apple varieties you are growing so that we can guess how large they should be in your climate. But for most apples, baseball size (hardball not softball) is short of normal ripe size.

By allowing too many apples to remain on your trees, you are reducing growth of these youngsters, and creating conditions for biennial bearing. You may see very few apples next season on your exhausted little trees.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Thanks, Don - the trees were planted, 1" dia bare root, this is their 4th summer. There are 5 or 6 varieties, and I carefully put copper labels on them to be able to identify them in the future, none of which can now be found :-).

I'll be busy picking apples today - apple sauce and fruit leather, here we come. I'll leave a dozen or so on each tree to see how they turn out.

Thanks for the reply. I guess I am more interested in when they stop increasing in size then their ultimate size. Do they continue to increase till the color changes?

I'm sure it varies a lot by area, but the apples around me seem to be smaller than usual this year. We've had a very cool and damp summer to go with it. The hottest week of the year is just finishing, when it should be in the 90's, and we spent the week in the low to mid 70's with a couple days only in the 60's. So I'm blaming the cool summer on small apples for the time of year, but the fall apples still have lots of time to grow.

I think the apples will continue to gain in size right up until they are ripe.

My physical memory kindof sucks, but fruit size seems about normal considering the late bud-break here. With the insane munsoon our growing season has been, I'm surprised they aren't the size of pumpkins. Hope we get drier soon with some cool nights so they can actually build some sugar.

I have come to the conclusion that Don's thinning advice is the best of all. Only by shooting for an exagerated rate of thinning can most of us possibly achieve an adequate rate. After years of thinning fruit on hundreds of trees I still under thin. I continue to remove fruit now.

All fruit I know of gain girth until they are completely ripe. Peaches double in their last 2 weeks.

I also expected huge apples with the amount of rain but many are undersized. I think too much rain causes deficiencies. Plus the disease of course.

I think large apples are largely overrated and the only reason people want large is because they're large. Just like "Giant" fruits and vegetable varieties sell product but have no bearing on taste.
I've also read that large apples don't store as well as the smaller ones.
I know mine can be too large for my peeler and a few can even be too large for my corer/slicer.

Well, the ones I thinned out were way too small for the corer/slicer, and they were turned into apple sauce. From one tree, I picked 2/3 of a bushel - this is after already thinning them severely, there were easily that much again on the ground. The main trunk is about 4" diameter at the base, most of the sagging, fruit-bearing limbs less than an inch.

I went ahead and thinned the bejabers out of all the remaining, sagging trees where the fruit wasn't ripe enough to eat.

When I next prune them, is there anything special I should do? My guess is that a fruit set this heavy is a once in 10 year occurrence.

Gary:
My McIntosh apples are currently around 1-1/2" dia. The Macouns and Novamacs are around 1-1/4" dia. They usually size up for me toward the end of August. Size really depends upon your current growing conditions. Although some apples seem to be sizing up slower than usual for me, such as Red Delicious, others are getting huge, like Parkland and Norland, which are between around 3-1/2" to 4-1/2" and we won't be picking them for a few weeks yet. I'm guessing Parkland and Norland like all the rain we've had lately.

David:
What I do when pruning sagging/weeping branches, that are sagging too much, is to let the waterspouts grow for a year on the branch, and then select a strong upright one close to the top of the arch of the branch. Cut off all the other unwanted waterspouts and cut the main branch back to the selected waterspout.

Sometimes sagging/weeping branches are good to have, especially on standard rootstock. One doesn't have to climb so high to pick the fruit. Other times, weepers aren't so great to have on standard rootstock, especially if one uses a tree shaker to drop the apples for pressing into cider.

I just measured my McIntosh drops, one was 2 3/4" most were 2 1/2". There are bigger and smaller on the tree and the tree is intentionally overloaded.

I don't like surplus water for any fruit- better a light drought- thats when the brix goes up. Still, I ate a ripe Ginger Gold today that was perfect in spite of the deluge we are experiencing. Everybody on this site raves about Williams Pride- which I like, but most years I prefer Ginger Gold as it performs here.

I expected watered down apples with the 12" we got in September of last year since it was at the end of the season but the cider was pretty good.
I just decided to ferment the last gallon and it's presently reading 7.5% potential alcohol which I think is pretty high for unsweetened cider. It's right where a recipe I have says to sugar up to.