Advice on thinning fruit

As the proprietor of a small loquat, fig, and lemon orchard (totalling 4 trees - well, the lemon's more of a shrub at this point) I was wondering about the best way to ensure the trees produce good-sized fruit. The loquats in particular tend to yield bunches of many small fruit with are largely filled with pits surrounded by a thin layer of flesh, and as a result aren't much fun to eat. I knew thinning was the recommended way to improve fruit size and quality, but wasn't sure how to go about it.

Fortunately I was able to find this article by Alice Ramirez from a 1997 issue of Flower & Garden Magazine, appropriately entitled "Thin That Fruit." The article notes that in addition to yielding a harvest of larger fruit with a better ratio of flesh to fruit, thinning wll also improve fruit flavor (those loquats have been pretty bland lately) and improve the health of the tree, since it's less likely to be overburdened by too many fruit and lose branches as a result.

It also recommends removing all the fruit from a small, developing plant, causing it to channel all its energy into developing the root and branch systems that will allow it to bear productively in future years. (I've just done this with a blueberry bush I planted recently - it wasn't exactly fun, since I love blueberries, but hopefully I'll be amply repaid next season.)

Other benefits of thinning include reducing the likelihood a tree will bear in alternate years, and the risk of "June drop," when summer heat stress causes a tree to drop all of its crop at once.

While most fruit trees can be thinned when the fruit is in the very early stages of development, Ramirez notes that loquats should be thinned at the flower stage by removing every other flower cluster. So that's at the top of my list for next growing season - until then, I'll just make do with gnawing on these pint-size loquats. (The birds and the squirrels certainly don't seem to mind them - maybe I'm just too picky.)