Yes you need to thin them. One peach every twelve inches is a good starting point.

OK...follow-up question: Is there any way to do it other than picking each peach off by hand?

I don't know about the 12 ", but if you want big ones you should take out all but one from a group - I'd call a group what you show in your photo. You could even leave 2 per group but farther from each other so they each have plenty of room.

You could try shaking the tree if it is too tall, but picking is more accurate.

do you want hundreds of ugly small fruit ... or a couple dozen prize winning fruit ....

also.. too many fruit all squished together can cause injury to each other .... and disease ... i dont know why .... maybe bugs hide between them ... and open wounds.. then they rot.. etc... etc ...

take the time to do it right ... i once tried to pull the leader tree over to trim it.. and snapped off a 6 foot section ... guess what i learned.... well ... it would have been worth it.. to walk and get the ladder ... duh ... lol ... soooo.. maybe shaking would work.. maybe it wont ...

the only thing left to me to wonder about.. is timing ... any chance some will abort on their own .... so it might be worth waiting a couple weeks .... or is now good enough?? .. is a cold snap still possible.. and can that impact them at this stage????

ken

ps: consider this.. if every single one of them came out.. what in the heck would you do with them all ...

The peaches will shed some excess fruit all on its own. The bigger problem with leaving too much fruit on the tree is that the branches quickly break from the excess weight. Ask me how I know. :)

PM, I also learned that by experience. I have a peach tree that had never had a peach on it in the 10 years I've been married to Elery. He threatened to cut it down last year and suddenly, it was loaded with fruit and I didn't even notice. Until the branches started breaking off. Of course, I hadn't pruned it either, having given up a couple of years ago, but it pruned itself by just getting so many fruit the branches broke off. (sigh) By the time I noticed, I couldn't reach the fruit to thin it. I got hundreds of peaches, about the size of a tennis ball or smaller and they were good, but it would have been a lot easier to peel and process bigger fruit.

So I'd wait to see which of the fruit drop naturally, and then I'd thin the fruit. I'll be watching mine this year, although my trees don't even have leaves yet here in Zone 5 Michigan. Mine looked like this and I should have gotten rid of at least half of those, maybe more.

Annie

Annie, I had a very similar experience in 2017, when one peach tree was 7 years old and the other was 4 years old. I had seen a couple dozen peaches the prior year, but all of that fruit aborted quickly. In 2017 the trees went nuts!!!! Here's a 2qt bowl full of the first bunch I removed... I cannot tell you how much time I wasted removing bowl after bowl of fruit like this and seeming to get nowhere.

I also hadn't pruned the trees and the branches started breaking early! However, in the end I had still had tons of peaches and even the small ones were delicious. I ate, baked, canned, froze, and gave away boxes and bags of the smaller peaches for weeks -- but the BIGGEST/BEST that remained on the trees the longest were cleaned out in one day by the neighborhood squirrels! They also cleaned out my beautiful loaded pear tree last year! :(

I still remember how incredible it smelled in the house then. Luckily I was teaching myself how to make willow baskets at the time. :)

PM, To add to the fun, mine are cling, variety unknown, and they didn't ripen until nearly October and everyone thought that was particularly strange. I don't know, it's the first year I ever got peaches. I did find that if I peeled them, I could use an apple slicer/corer, one of those round type that you just press down, and the small pit usually fit right through the center "hole", where the apple core would go. It made slicing and pitting a lot faster. And yes, like your house, mine smelled wonderful. Might have had something to do with peach cobbler......

I had barn cats, so the squirrels pretty much stayed away. Wish I could say the same for groundhogs. I'd have been super ticked off, though, waiting for those big peaches and having the squirrels get them all, ugh.

Annie

Thanks for all the info. On the weekend I did a little trimming of inner branches and I thinned just a tad. I've been busy with other early-season tasks so I didn't feel I had the time to stand and do the job right. I will hope that some fruit does abort soon. I hate the thought of taking the time to thin, and then the tree decides to drop half of what's left.

My other dilemma is what to spray with to keep the worms away! And, of course, how to keep the *&#^% squirrels out of the tree when the peaches are approaching ripe.

Just an added note: I didn't thin the Apriums... and... the ones that were all alone were huge and the ones that were in a bunch were about half the size.

Our neighborhood cats like my yard because it is quiet and uninhabited for the most part. The white one is a huntress and really stalks anything that tries to invade the garden. So, other than a peck or two, mine were perfect... and organic.

As the peaches grow I worry more and more about broken limbs. Yesterday I got out the 6’ step ladder and thinned the tree even more. I plucked these English walnut-sized peaches from this smallish tree. I had previously thinned about the same volume off of the lower branches using a step stool.