Tree Care Basics: A Starter Guide

Fruitless Wishes: When Your Backyard Trees Produce Too Much Fruit

19 June 2023

Johnni Knight

The thought of a large fruit tree in your backyard producing vast quantities of fruit for you and your family to enjoy sounds quite beautiful and tranquil, doesn't it? The reality might be very different. What are your options when you're overwhelmed by the amount of fruit that might be rotting on the ground right outside your home?

High Yields

The amount of fruit that a backyard tree is capable of producing can be surprising. A mature apple tree can provide up to 690 lbs of fruit each season. In theory, this is a positive thing. There's an abundance of fruit for you and your family—even enough to share with others. But the reality of keeping up with the amount of fruit a tree can produce can be overwhelming, and you may even have multiple mature fruiting trees. 

Wasted Fruit

A significant amount of fruit may be lost each year, dropped onto the ground to decompose. This attracts insects, and it may be increasingly unpleasant to navigate your way through rotting and decaying fruit on the ground each time you go through your own backyard. Something needs to be done, and you have two realistic options—pruning the tree to reduce its fruit yield or tree removal.

Minimizing Fruit Yield

Most backyard gardeners take care to only prune an appropriate amount of a fruit tree's foliage, and this cautious pruning is performed to maximize fruit yield. With the objective of minimizing fruit yield, you can top the tree (remove its upper branches). Provided that enough of the canopy remains, the tree will have sufficient foliage to photosynthesize and sustain itself. Unfortunately, the results can look unsightly, and with a mature tree, this crude approach exposes too much of the tree's inner structure—making it vulnerable to parasites. Given the height and age of the tree, if you choose to prune, calling in a professional tree services company is your best bet—and even more so when you have multiple large fruit trees. A significant amount of foliage will be removed while maintaining physical symmetry. The tree will subsequently produce less fruit. 

Fruit Tree Removal

Outright removal of the tree is another option, although this is a decision that requires careful consideration. And yet if you have multiple fruit trees, thinning out their ranks can be a convenient solution to your excess fruit problem. This is best handled by a professional, who can remove the tree in sections (which is the safest approach with large trees) before digging up the stump so that all remains of the tree is a patch of soil. If you wish to replace the tree (with a non-fruiting variety), it's best to do so immediately after removal, before the soil resettles.

An excessive amount of unwanted fruit can make your yard an unpleasant environment, and one way or another, the tree's fruit yield needs to be controlled—or stopped.

Contact a tree removal service for more information. 

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