Growing apple trees, grafting scions

[MapleCamp]

I have some like that to I was told that there is a fungus that is abundant this summer

[barnbc76]

Been an up down year, everything started out good then the rabbits came. The rain here has been relentless, the longest stretch without rain or precipitation is 5 days, anything longer and you would have to go back to january to find longer stretches. Its not just a little rain either it seems to always be downpours. This has caused some ugly fungal/scab diseases on our mature mcintosh which has caused it to loose all of its fruit. The rest of my newly grafted trees did not get these diseases fortunately, however many were totally killed by rabbits, or severly stunted. I also neglected to weed around all my trees, suprisingly i think this may have saved many of them because the rabbits could not easily find them i think. The weeds grow profusely where i planted the trees, next time i need to be more vigilient as spraying weed killer once is more or less pointless. My orchard is surrounded by 7ft tall grass weeds, good dirt but unbelivably vigourus weeds.

Anyone tried growing tomatoes with a young apple tree? It was accidental as a volunteer tomato grew out of the compost i placed around the 2nd year tree, both tree and tomatoes are growing vigourously, not bad considering the tomato was not started indoors 6 weeks like my other tomatos. It has had the added benefit of growing just inside the fence around the apple tree.

[buckeye gold]

I only have one fruiting apple left as a storm took out all my old trees last year. The one left did not get good pollination, but what apples are on it are ok, just small for some reason. My peaches were smaller this year as well, but we had a bumper crop and they were really sweet and clean of defects

[johnpma]

I have some like that to I was told that there is a fungus that is abundant this summer

Did it look like this??? Frustrating as heck.......

[barnbc76]

Update: this year has gone in the record books for rain, not that good for fruit trees. To make matters worse one of the rows of trees I planted was under about 6" of water for a couple of days when we had yet another flood. I believe when all is said and done I will have about 6 trees die but mostly due to either rabbits, or poor grafts that did not take. As far as graft success rate goes it was very high for whip & tounge, maybe 85% and not so good for cleft graft, like 50%. The trees in buckets seemed to fair better, this is probably because they did not have the weed competition and did not get eaten by rabbits. Overall I could have done a better job weeding and keeping rabbits off but the orchard is still doing fine. The growth on my trees is anywhere from 1ft to 3 1/2ft with noticeably more growth on certain varieties typically ones said to be more vigorus growers. My second year tree has finally taken off now and has about 4' of growth on it. Looking for my first crispin apples on it next year.

I will probably do some more grafting this year but not likely as much since my wife is expecting with an april delivery date. I now also have a honey bee hive so this will make things much more interesting and fun.

[spud]

I never gave an update on my orchard this year and I'm sorry for that. In the spring I planted 100 more Cortland trees and they have been growing very well. I cut all the branches 21 inch and lower to put screen on them. The center of my orchard is a bit wet and we got a lot of rain this year. Two years ago I gambled and planted 150 trees there in hopes they would survive. They are all doing good except for one tree that died. I think they are adapting to the wetter soil but they are not growing anywhere near as fast as other trees I have in better soil. I plucked about 4-5 apples off each one of those trees this spring just to let the trees grow. I plan to do that for the next three years. The upper part of my orchard has 250 trees that are 4 and 5 years old. All these trees grew very well and I too have 1-3 feet of new growth on them. I think had I done a better job of pruning in the March I may of seen more fruit. Much of the energy went to growing new branches that should not be there. I plan to prune a lot better this March in hopes of getting a good amount of fruit on what will be my 5-6 year old trees. Jon Clements who runs the U-Mass orchard said he plan to stop by in the spring to look at what I have. It will be fun to pick his brain. He has some great you tube videos if anyone is interested. I tried my luck at whip grafting and I had about 50% success. Some of the grafts grew 3 feet this summer. It will be fun to watch them grow. My pear trees are really growing well. I have about 4 feet of new growth and they really need to be pruned better. I hope to see pears on my 5 year old next summer. My plum trees grew very well but no plums yet. They will be 4 years old next summer so maybe I will see some fruit. My 10 cherry trees are growing very well and I enjoy fresh cherry jam and pies. I bought 3 Peach trees from Starks mid season but the all died. They are sending me three new ones in the spring. They are Reliance Peach trees that are Dwaft. I plan to whip graft some of my Freedom apples to other trees just for fun next spring. Can I cut above the graft on a two year old tree and graft a Freedom branch into it? What kind of grafting is that called? Two of the biggest things I have learned so far is not to overcrop a young tree and also to do a better job of pruning. It's just a hobby and when I become a pro at it I will probably die.

Spud

[amaranth farm]

Radio Silence.

[spud]

All apple trees are on B-118 Rootstock. Trees are 16 feet apart with 20 foot rows. In all I have 550 fruit trees. If I keep telling the wife it's a hobby she will never expect any income made. I wish I had told her my 9000 taps was a hobby.

Spud

[barnbc76]

Spud, you can graft over those enterprise trees if you want. If you do it at say 3ft (or however tall you want your first set of branches then you will be a little further ahead.

Doing it this way will still keep the enterprise tree though, you would want to trim any off shoots from it. I believe the technical term would be top working a tree, and i guess technically the enterprise would be an interstem (sometimes used in grafting to achive certain desired growth/or disease resistance.
Example, you graft a dwarf interstem like bud9 onto a mm111 rootstock to gain the ability to have a tree that does not need to be staked, and can grow in less than ideal conditions but it will also have the precociousness and the smaller size of the bud9. If your enterprise trees are less than ideal it will cause whatever you graft to it to possibly be as bad. If you wanted the b-118 then you would have to cut the trees at ground level this offseason, then wait for the new b-118 shoots to grow up, then graft onto those, as you can see that would take alot longer to do, taking another year and a half before you could graft them.

[spud]

Thank you for the information. I see on some U-Tube videos that they cut a tree at 3-4 feet and graft into it but they allow 1-2 branches to stay so the energy has someplace to go. So if I did that to some of my Red Rome trees the bottom 1-2 branches would be Red Rome and then the rest of my tree would be whatever I graft on. I plan to graft some Freedom apples to the Red Rome. Does this sound like the right way to do it? Thanks

Spud