Green apple tree planting

Growing Apple Trees

Here’s a look at apple tree pollination, planting and protecting your trees

Growing apple trees is easy but when buying, you do need to consider pollination needs before you select your trees!

This page also deals with planting apple trees for a good start in your garden and protecting your new trees from rabbits, deer and wind.

This is the second page on growing apples. Other pages that might interest you:
Growing apples (1): The different shapes and sizes and what to choose for your site.
Growing apples (3) How to prune apple trees and disease prevention and management.

Apple tree pollination groups

The next important thing to consider before growing apple trees is the blossom groups or pollination groups.

Apple trees need to have another apple tree nearby flowering at the same time so that pollination can occur. If you live near to other people with apple trees this might solve the problem for you.

If you live where there are no nearby suitable apples or crab apples then you will need to buy young trees which are compatible. For example, if you buy one Egremont Russet, then you will need either a second Russet or a different variety which is compatible. Otherwise, a long-flowering crab apple can do the trick as they are compatible with many apple varieties.

One of the fun things about growing apple trees at home is exploring the less usual varieties.

Suffolk, where I live, has lots of venerable old apple varieties which are well worth growing. Organisations are springing up to preserve and propagate old varieties like these.

It’s also great to grow your own organic apples because you are promoting your own good health, that of your family and the long-term health of the soil.

If you consider this route to apple heaven, do take advice so that your apple trees are pollinated properly each season. Growing apple trees successfully is even more satisfying if you raise organic well-adapted stock.

Growing apple trees —
About the pollination groups

Things can get complicated here. Apple trees are divided by growers into pollination groups. Commonly they are divided into 4 or 5 main groups but there are more complicated systems which are favoured by some growers.

The main reason for these groups is because flowering occurs at different times. If you buy a group 1 pollinator and pair it up with a group 5 pollinator you are unlikely to get any fruit from either. The bees which do the work are unable to time travel!

There is some cross-over between adjacent groups and a flowering crab apple can be very useful because they often have a long flowering period.

But failing that, you do need to select new trees for growing apples quite carefully.

If you want to research some of the less common varieties and their pollination groups check out: Garden Action which has a good list of pollination groups.

More on pollination — triploid pollinators

What makes apple tree pollination sound even more complicated is that there are some trees which require two different nearby apple trees to ensure successful pollination. They are called triploid pollinators. The common cooking apple Bramley and Blenheim Orange both come into this group.

In practice, it’s usually quite easy to ensure good pollination occurs. Just get several compatible trees and place them near each other.

It’s also worth checking what trees your neighbours have; this can save you the need buy a tree just for pollination purposes. Neighbours’ trees need to be within a short distance from your orchard (20 or 30 metres or less, ideally) and the tree(s) need to be compatible.

Sponsored links

Growing apple trees —
How old is my new tree — and how long will it live?

When you buy stock for growing apple trees you can buy them almost ready to crop at a few years old. If you plant them carefully and look after them you should have usable fruit within two to three years. If this looks like an expensive option you can buy one year old apple trees called «maidens» more cheaply.

The downside of this is that you won’t be actually harvesting apples to eat for a few more years. If you are prepared to wait five or more years for your crops this can be a cheaper option, worth considering if you are looking to extend an already productive orchard, perhaps.

It’s also worth knowing that most of the small-rootstock trees sold in garden centres have a relatively limited lifespan. Growing apple trees on standard rootstocks — which become relatively big trees — is a good idea if you have space. Many of these trees can live for a hundred years or more.

Many of the smaller garden apple trees grown on small rootstocks may only manage ten to twenty years as productive trees. However, they are quicker to reach fruit-bearing maturity.

Having selected some suitable apple trees you next need to think about planting your tree.

Picture: Growing apple trees to provide dessert apples for your table is very rewarding. Egremont Russet is a sweet and tasty variety. This one is on a semi-dwarf rootstock.

Growing apple trees —
Planting your trees

Buy your trees in late autumn, winter or early spring. The soil should be damp but not freezing cold. Late October on is a good time in the northern hemisphere. If you plant at other times be very careful to irrigate thoroughly and keep a look out for the new plants drying out. You can sometimes find cheap trees at the end of the season in garden centres and nurseries.

Its generally not worth buying bare-rooted trees outside of the proper planting times. The risk of failure is too high. Pot-grown apple trees are a bit more forgiving but adequate irrigation is absolutely essential.

Space and light

It is important that your trees have enough space to grow and thrive and that there is plenty of available light. Other than that, planting is easy. Avoid any dubious areas, for example where old concrete has been buried. If you plant in grass you need to clear back the turf in a ring around the tree and keep it clear. Your young tree is far more likely to die in its first year if it is throttled with grass.

Dig a hole double the width of the pot that the young apple tree has grown in. Make it slightly deeper than the pot. Loosen the soil in the bottom of the hole and add a shovel full of good compost. Mix the compost into the soil.

Carefully remove the pot from the roots (you may need to turn the whole thing upside down and deliver a sharp tap with the back of a spade.) Loosen any stray root ends so that contact with the soil from the hole is made straight away.

Staking the tree

Place the apple tree into the hole and add a stake which is at least 4 feet tall. Don’t let the stake interfere with the roots. Backfill the soil and a little more compost.

Check that the new soil level around the plant does not cover the join where the tree was grafted. This is usually quite low down near the base of the plant. You do want the top of the potting compost from the plant pot to be covered because peat (the usual medium) does dry out rather quickly. Your new tree will retain moisture better if the top is covered with soil. Make sure that you tread everything down carefully so that the root ball is stable in the earth and in good contact with the soil.

Water everything copiously. The tree should be tied below where the leaves start to the post so as to stabilise it if the wind picks up. Some growers put the stake in at an angle so as to avoid the root ball. Old tights are an excellent choice for tying up young trees. They don’t have to be recognisable — just cut off a leg! They are flexible yet strong and durable.

You can buy proper tree ties which keep the space between the tree and the stake without any rubbing or undue movement. They are not particularly expensive and can be re-used.

Tree ties should not keep the tree immobile but should rather reduce wind movement to a manageable amount. Trees which are staked too rigidly may not develop their own root system to cope with wind, leaving them potentially vulnerable.

Sponsored links

Growing apple trees —
Protecting young apple trees from rabbits (Grr!)

Protecting young apple trees from roving wildlife and from strong winds is essential. If you have rabbits or other wildlife such as deer in the area you will need to use a tree guard. Even rabbits can be amazingly destructive to young growing apple trees. They can kill them in one night’s action!

I know because this is what happened to me. I thought my garden was rabbit-free but some got in and nibbled right around one tree and nearly destroyed a second one. I’d only just bought them! It set the less damaged tree back about two years and the other one was dead within a few days. Expensive mistake.

You will need more than a spiral plastic tree-guard if deer or other large ruminants are near your trees. Erect a wire fence at a distance which makes it impossible to reach the tree. Make sure the fencing posts are stout and well anchored in the ground.

Deer and rabbit netting is now available from Amazon.

If you have a secure border to your orchard, growing apple trees can be more straight forward. But you will still need to anchor your new trees with stakes because it can hard for the root ball to become established if there is a lot of wind buffeting.

Wind protection for apple trees

Some native species hedges around your orchard can help keep the wind down. It is no accident that many traditional orchards are found within high walls or in other secluded locations.

Tree-based wind wind protection has the advantage that the wind speed is calmed rather than completely altered. High walls can create turbulence which affects some areas behind the wall. Trees and hedges reduce strong winds for crops sheltering on the lee side.

Even with good shelter, some kind of staking is almost essential for the first few months of growth while the tree gets properly established.

Apple growing books

If you want good books about growing apple trees and related topics here are a few choices to whet your appetite.

This guy knows his onions — or rather his apples! He’s been growing them and promoting organic orchards and fruit growing in the US for years!

See more book selections from Amazon on the right side panel. I haven’t read them all — but they look good! It’s well worth having one or two good books to consult on apple growing; you can explore issues in more depth than you will find on most web pages.

Orchard apples are a delight well worth having. I hope you have some great success growing apple trees at home.

Don’t forget that in many places it is now becoming easier to set up a community orchard. See Fruit tree orchards and the community for more on this.

Источник

Apple Tree Diseases and Planting Location

Apple trees branches covered in patches of white, woolly fuzz? What you’re seeing is a woolly aphid infestation . These pests can be controlled by spraying a few applications of horticultural oil spray (preferably a natural oil based product rather than a petroleum oil based one) 7 days apart, it suffocates them quite effectively, and gets past the fluffy coat which repels liquids and protects them from most insecticides.

Problem solved? Maybe not…

The Root Cause of the Problem or Just a Symptom?

Too often in gardening we see the bad practice of quickly identifying a pest or disease and then jumping straight to a chemical control without looking any further.

Yes, we can spray this pest with that natural or synthetic product, but will it work? What if it doesn’t? Do we just spray more, or spray something else?

Too often in the agriculture and horticulture world, lip service is payed to the whole science of ecology, but it’s an inconvenient truth that’s more often ignored, as it’s much easier to pretend that plants ‘grow in a vacuum’ and don’t interact with their living and non-living surroundings. Sometimes the answers we seek lie outside the area we only choose to see.

Woolly aphid infestation on apple tree branches

One pattern often observed is that apple trees affected by woolly aphid also show of various yellow, brown or black blotches or spots on the leaves, which are caused by fungal diseases. Note, these diseases are different to the sooty mould formed from the honeydew excreted by the aphids. If we’re seeing this pattern, the logical question to ask is what would be causing the fungal diseases?

A common cause of fungal diseases is lack of air circulation, which causes wet leaves to stay moist, promoting fungal infections. This often happens when trees get too dense from lack of pruning, and the solution is to prune to open up the canopy to allow air and light through.

Sometimes apple trees may be planted hard up against a wall or fence, in a corner, or jammed between other trees, which can cause similar problems. Clearing space around trees, pruning and then spraying with the appropriate fungicide helps. Spraying with lime sulphur or copper fungicide during dormancy, potassium bicarbonate or an appropriate copper fungicide when trees are in leaf, is usually effective for many fungal diseases.

But what happens if the pests and diseases keep returning?

In the garden nursery where I work part-time, I started noticing gardeners reporting increasing incidences of woolly aphid infestations combined with leaf fungal diseases, which caught my attention. By chance, two of the apple trees I maintained at work had a similar problem. They did not fruit much, were constantly affected by woolly scale and leaf fungal diseases, yet they were planted in a location which was wide open, even severely windswept, with lots of open space around them. Yet no matter how many times I sprayed these two trees, the problems returned. Companion planting and beneficial predator insects released on site didn’t help much either. So what could the problem be?

In Permaculture, we emphasise choosing the right plant for the right location, matching plants with their ecological niches, giving them the conditions they favour. To determine what we can plant where, we first ‘read the site’ to see where the ‘wild energies’ of wind, water and sunlight move through our location.

Applying these permaculture concepts, it was easy to read the site and identify the cause of the problem, the location where the apple trees at work were planted was in shade until around 1pm or 2pm, depending on the time of year, then received full west sun till sunset. Some fruit trees cope with varying degrees of shade, and just fruit less, but it appears that apples get very unhappy in shady locations, they get weak and sick!

Discussing the matter with customers who reported these same problems, I asked how much shade their apple trees were in – and surprise, surprise, their trees were shaded out significantly! The problem of shading and limited sunlight in backyard gardens is becoming more prevalent in the suburbs here in the major cities in Australia. Developers are buying up any available property, demolishing it, and putting up multi-storey high-density housing, built right up against the fenceline, casting shade across neighbouring properties. To maintain privacy, neighbours are forced to plant tall screening trees, hedges and plants. The net result is that backyards in the suburbs are getting smaller and shadier, and apple trees are suffering from a lack of light.

Holistic Problem Solving – Seeing the Big Picture

If your apple trees are constantly being attacked by pests such as woolly scale and fungal diseases, and fruiting very little or not at all, and they’re being being properly fertilised and watered, then the issue may be that they’re not getting enough sunlight.

Oh, they get enough sun – is a comment I hear often. I’m not buying your word for it unless you have recorded the approximate times when sun or shade passes over the apple tree at various times of the year when it’s in leaf! Fruit trees need a minimum of 6-8 hours of full sunlight all year round while they have leaves. The actual observation results may surprise you. Unless it an observation, it’s a guess, and if you wouldn’t risk your own life on a wild random guess, why would you do that with the lives of your trees?

No amount of spraying of any garden product, natural or chemical, is going to help keep a plant alive in the long term if it’s planted in the wrong location. If conditions have changed, and less light is available, assuming an apple tree is not too large in size, a viable option is to dig up the apple tree in winter when it’s dormant, and transplant it, moving it to a better location.

The reality is that garden problems can have multiple causes, and pests and diseases aren’t necessarily the actual cause of the problem, but often just the symptoms indicating a weakened and unhealthy plant or tree. Pests and pathogens serve a very important ecological role, to attack and eliminate unhealthy plants and trees in order to make space for healthy ones to replace them.

So before reaching for the garden sprays, it’s best to spend a bit longer looking at what could be affecting the health of your trees and plants and then take appropriate action. It will be less work for you in the long term and such an approach will ensure the long term survival of the plants and trees in your garden!

Источник