How to Thin Apple Trees in 5 Easy Steps

Thinning apple trees is an important part of growing healthy trees with big, juicy fruits. Join gardening expert Melissa Strauss to walk through the process of thinning your apple trees this season.

Written by Melissa Strauss Horticulture review by Sarah Jay Last updated: May 16, 2025 | 5 min read

A gardener holding a lovely fruit after they thin apple trees

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From ‘Gala‘ to ‘Anna’ and ‘Honeycrisp‘ to ‘Granny Smith,’ apples are among the most popular fruits in the world. They are a great source of fiber, vitamin C, and antioxidants, and are healthy, nutritious, and delicious. These superfruits are said to improve mental and gut health and even have cancer-fighting properties!

Apple trees are in the rose family, and among more than 8,000 varieties, there is a wide range of flavors and textures. Some are best for eating raw, while others stand up well to canning, preserving, and baking into yummy pies! Whatever you like to do with your apples, growing them in your garden is a fulfilling and gratifying experience.

Growing apple trees doesn’t have to be difficult, but certain care practices like thinning can lead to bigger, healthier, and tastier fruits. This process involves reducing the number of fruits on the tree. Thinning your apple tree has great benefits and will lead to stronger, more fruitful growth and harvests in the long run.

Why Thin Your Apple Trees?

We are here to talk about how, but first, let’s address the what and the why. So, what is thinning? Thinning is the practice of removing some fruit from your fruit trees to make important improvements in the fruit and for the tree.

Naturally, in the wild, thinning of fruit trees occurs when animals eat them, and other forces knock them down. In cultivation, it’s something that we do deliberately for three important reasons.

Reduce Limb Breakage

A person holding on to a red round fruit, appearing vibrant and fresh attached to a spur with other fruits — Excessive weight on one branch may make it break.

When those tiny little apples first begin to form, they hardly weigh a thing. However, as they grow, they put on weight, and this pulls down on the branches of the tree. All that weight can distort the shape of your branches.

Worse than affecting the tree’s shape, too much fruit can snap branches right off. So by reducing the number of fruits per branch, we also reduce the stress and the occurrence of breaking.

Increase Fruit Size and Improve Quality

Round and red fruits attached to the plant, having a moist surface with countless fruits in the background — Trimming them down helps improve fruit quality.

Second, thinning will help the tree to produce larger, better-quality fruit. If a tree has to put energy into too many fruits at one time, none of them will get all they need to meet their potential.

Removing some of the apples allows the tree to apply the same amount of energy to fewer fruits. That means your apples will be larger and most likely taste better.

Prevent Overbearing

Branches drooping down leaning toward the grass, full of countless red and round fruits — The entire plant suffers if it bears too many fruits.

This and the last reason go hand in hand. Overbearing is when a tree produces more fruit than it can support. This could happen because the branches are too weak, or as a result of improper pruning.

In the event of overloading, the fruit, we know, won’t be as good, but it can also harm the tree, and next year’s harvest. This is especially true of younger trees.

The extra fruit takes energy away from the rest of the tree, including the roots. This can result in a sub par crop the following year as the tree recovers.

So, let’s get to thinning that apple tree, shall we?

Don’t Wait Too Long

A person using clippers to cut parts of the woody plant with small green underdeveloped fruits — Start cutting when the fruits are still developing.

You don’t have to wait until your apples reach a certain size to thin them out. As long as you can see the fruit developing, you should be able to get it done. You do want to be able to determine which are the strongest apples, but that should be fairly obvious by about three to six weeks after the flowers fall.

There is a point in time commonly called the ‘June Drop,’ when your tree will naturally shed some apples. You should do your thinning right around the same time. As soon as you see some of those developing apples dropping, it’s time to go in there and do your own work.

Leave One Fruit Per Spur

Someone using clippers to remove fruits off a branch appearing deep brown with rich green foliage — Remove the appropriate amount of fruits on each spur based on its maturity.

Ideally, you want to leave one apple per spur. A spur is a short branch that formed in the previous year. Apples are produced on old growth, so these spurs will bear fruit in the second year. The spurs your tree is growing this year will bloom and bear fruit next spring.

Most apple trees are spur bearers, with just a few exceptions. These exceptions produce apples at the end of longer shoots that also formed the previous year. In both cases, it is old wood that forms buds. On a spur-bearing tree, rather than budding at the end of second-year shoots, those shoots produce small nubby branches, which are the spurs.

The first pass you make will be to remove all but one apple from each spur. One spur can produce several blossoms, but more than one apple will produce too much weight. In this first pass, just focus on leaving one apple per spur.

Choose the Healthiest Apples

A gardener positioning clippers to remove a branch with many bright green leaves — Check which parts have the best fruits before cutting.

This one is obvious, but it’s important, so I thought I should include it anyway. When you are thinning to one apple per spur, choose the most robust apples to remain, and remove the smaller, weaker ones.

The best apple is typically not the absolute largest; rather, it will be the second largest in most cases. The largest apple will be the ‘king fruit’ or the one that is situated in the center of the cluster. This fruit is the one most likely to have imperfections. Remove this one along with the weaker ones.

Space Fruits Properly

Two round and red fruits dangling under the shade surrounded by bright green leaves — Avoid leaving too many fruits on each spur to prevent branches from breaking.

On your second pass, focus on the spacing between spurs to ensure that there are not too many per branch. A branch may have quite a lot of spurs, and if the main branch is not strong enough to hold up a mature apple on every one of them, there is more thinning to do.

If you’re dealing with a thin, weak branch, it’s good to leave only one or two apples, even if it has more spurs. While the branches should grow stronger over the summer season, you don’t want to make them work overtime supporting more weight than they should.

For stronger branches with lots of spurs, you want to thin the spurs to one every six to eight inches. This means that you should have one apple at six to eight inch intervals along your stronger branches, and slightly less on narrower ones.

Remove Gently

A person holding a small round fruit still developing dangling from a woody branch — Gently grabbing and plucking off the fruits is an effective method.

You have options when it comes to your removal method. If you have a small pair of clippers, small enough to reach between apples, you can use these. However, it’s more common to pluck them off by hand, as you’re more dexterous than those clippers.

Gently grasp a fruit between your thumb and forefinger and pull gently while twisting. Pull upward rather than down to get a cleaner break and put less stress on the branch. If you pull downward, you risk cracking the branch or pulling off all the apples from that cluster.

What you have left will be an apple tree with just the right number of apples for the tree to support without breaking branches or ending up with subpar apples. You’ll get the largest, best-tasting, and healthiest apples this way, and the tree won’t be so stressed that it doesn’t produce next year.