Over the course of the last 6 years, I've documented how we have progressively thinned a 3-acre block of Kanza trees (photo at right). In 2012, I drew up a tree thinning plan and have removed trees only within areas of the orchard with tree crowding. Year after year the trees continued to grow. As adjacent branches started to touch, we cut more trees. You can review the history of our thinning plan and the progress we made removing trees over the past 6 year by checking out the links listed below.
1. 2012, 2013, and 2014 tree thinning
2. 2015 tree thinning
3. 2016 tree thinning
4. 2017 tree thinning
Following the 2017 pecan harvest, we measured the diameter of each tree's trunk and plotted that data on the map pictured at left. Each tree in the orchard is designated by a green circle with the size of that circle directly proportional to the diameter of the trunk. As you can see from the map, the bulk of the trees that still need removing are located at the south end of the field. You will also note that the largest trees in this orchard are located in the northeast corner. If you review the history of our progressive thinning plan, you'll find that we started the thinning process in the NE corner of the orchard back in 2012.
This year we completed the thinning plan by removing 23 tree from the orchard. The black dots on the map at left shows the location of the trees removed this winter.
When this orchard was established from stratified seed in 1996, we set trees 30 feet apart in a square pattern. In 2000, we grafted all 144 trees to Kanza. Now that we have completed our thinning plan, we have 72 trees remaining spaced 42.4 feet apart. The trees are still arranged in a square pattern but the squares are now tilted 45 degrees from the original north-south orientation.
It won't be too many more years until this orchard will need another thinning plan as the remaining trees continue to grow at the rate of 1/2 inch in trunk diameter per year. The next thinning plan will remove every other north-south row to carve out an orchard with trees 60 feet apart.
