Trying to figure out the cause of this. Weather has been all over the place since bloom, hot as 86 degrees, as cold as 26 degrees. Minimal bee activity during bloom. I didnt have alot of fruit set, now it seems what little fruit I did have what I thought was set is dropping/aborting from the tree. Tree is growing well, healthy leaves. I have not sprayed with anything but Captan and Inspire (another fungicide).
Any thoughts? Fruit size is roughly 6-7 mm. Clean abscision line where stem meets branch, spur,etc… Cut open fruitlets seem to show 5 seeds and healthy othewise.
I don’t think you got any pollination- is that likely the case? You know better than I, but it seems to me that unpollinated pomes typically abort. I suspect the bee/tree equation just didn’t pan out for you this year, given the weather. Be interested in seeing what really happened.
It could very well be that they werent pollinated. Weather was terrible during bloom and bee activity was minimal at best. It just seems that the fruitlet that is split open looks normal with 5 seeds forming?
I just read an article on using Promalin to increase fruit set during frost events, might have to try that next year as I already have Promalin on hand for other uses. On one hand luckily I am not in the fruit growing business (just trees), on the other hand just like everyone I am disappointed when I dont have fruit to watch grow and enjoy eating.
Every year, the apple also decides whether it has enough resources to carry the pollinated fruitlets to full maturity. If resources are limited, then it purposefully aborts a fraction of the fruitlets. This is called the “June Drop” by farmers. As a result, the remaining fruitlets get more milk from mommy, so to speak.
Good point. I take seeds forming to mean that pollination happened, but I haven’t looked closely enough to know; maybe without pollination the seeds just remain tiny. I dunno …
From my observations last year, some of my fruitlets that abscissed had 1 seed, and some had 4 or so. The apples I picked later in the year usually had variable numbers, but some only had a couple. So it is really hard to say that it is just seeds forming.
I only had apples on Liberty and Zestar! last year, which both are pollination group 2 and we had a frost which damaged many flowers. So frost post-pollination could be an issue, maybe?
Yes I dont think it is an over abundance of fruit set. This is a tree on B9 (7’ tall) that I allowed to crop for the first time last year with maybe 6 fruit. There are other fruitlets that had brown stems and no size that I took to mean they were unfertilized that have dropped but now it has progressed to the larger fruitlets. There are very few fruitlets remaining on the tree as of now. It could be something related to the weather, but I would think there would be some other visual indications of frost damage.
According to the link below on spring freeze damage, post-blossom apples suffer a 10% kill at 28 degrees, and a 90% kill at 25 degrees, so at 26 degrees you can expect a lot of frost kill.
Could be non-pollination too though – I think those things you are calling seeds are really the seed cavities where the seeds would form if the blossom was pollinated, and it’s far to early to see if seeds are actually growing in those seed cavities.
Well I guess there are lots of things it could be. Maybe the best thing to do is to wait and see if the other trees go through the same thing or if they set and hold fruit. The variety is JNC which was named after John Cummins of Cummins Nursery. Very hard to find much info about it as very few people grow it. Like I mentioned previously I didnt let it set much fruit last year so I wouldnt think it would be biannual. It is one of my earlier bloomers so I guess I will lean towards cold and frost damage.
