Fruit Picker - Looking for the Best Fruit Pickers

With the onset of late summer and fall, we hope to need some way of picking the fruit from our fruit trees. As the tree grows in height, many of the apples, oranges, pears, and other fruits start to get out of reach and the owner of a fruit tree faces the chore of getting it down without damaging it. Most of us aren’t crazy about climbing a ladder to get to the top of the tree, so a fruit picker is a great investment. Here’s a look at some different fruit pickers, and some features to look for in a good fruit picker.

Most fruit pickers are similar in construction. They are basically a wire basket that has some fingers or hooks at the top that form an opening at the top. Often the “basket” has a soft lining at the bottom to reduce the bruising that might occur as the fruit is picked by the fingers. The idea is to hook the fruit with the fingers and pull it off the tree, and have it drop gently into the basket. Sometimes the basket is replaced by a bag that catches the fruit, but the concept is similar.

These sometimes come on a pole, sometimes on a telescoping pole, or you can even buy the picker without a pole, and attach it to a pole of your own. Choose the size of the pole based on how tall your tree is not only this year but in the next few years.

One common problem with this type of picker is that sometimes the fruit isn’t as ready as you are for it to come down, and it will not just easily pull off the tree. To deal with this, some pickers like the WOLF GARTEN Fruit Picker have a blade built into the head which can be angled to cut the stem of the fruit as you pull and drop the fruit into the bag. It’s a little bit of an art to use that, but it beats pulling so hard that the branch breaks, which can easily occur with some trees.

Another alternative to this is the Picker Twister. This unit is unique in the it uses a small grip that grabs the fruit, and twists it off, so that you don’t need to cut the stem, and it just holds the fruit so it doesn’t need a bag. This one gets a lot of positive reviews on Amazon, so it’s probably worth a look.