Honeycrisp. Only tree to bloom this year. No neighbors…!!! Will it drop off?
Katy
Well…it’s a Box Store Honeycrisp 
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Was it in bloom when you bought the tree? If so, those flowers got pollinated.
Also, your remaining apple looks good.
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No, this bloomed after the tree was here. I thought of that but no blooms before purchase. I thought it kinda sad that it bloomed with no hope of apples. How far away could another apple tree feasibly be? I live in rural area but I don’t know of any neighboring apples.
Bees could fly a couple of miles. Any crab apples would do. I hope that baby in the pic hangs on. I just thinned hundreds of Honey Crisp flowers off my tree to prevent its biennial cycle. Wish we were near!!!
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It would be really cool if it did mature. This is first year for apples in our orchard…planted some bare root whips in the fall and the Honeycrisp was kind of an impulse buy when we saw it at Lowe’s. I have a hard time passing up cheap trees!! Hope your tree gives you babies this year!
My tree is 10 years old and has fruited several times but every other year. HC and many apples will do that if you don’t thin them very well.
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I’ve heard that will happen. Good luck with your thinning!
I hope for you it is actually HC. I bought a dozen from a big box store years ago and only one was HC. I think most of the rest are Pink lady and the apples are good, but not what the label said.
I now only buy from nurseries so I have recourse if they are not as described. I have since bought 8 more HC from Schlabach’s but this is only their 3rd year. Like Mamuang, I have had a hard time removing enough fruit, and my only HC has been biennial. I thought I took enough fruit off last year, but it looks like mine is still mostly biennial. I only have about a dozen flowers starting to show this year. Looks like I’ll have to be more aggressive next year…
Good luck to yours being as described. If it’s not you can always change it over. I’m sure their are plenty of people willing to send scions, myself included. I really like HC right off the tree.
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Well, did you get a fruit?
(A wild crab or seedling tree in a woods or field somewhere probably pollinated it).
Yep. Small and bug bitten but it didn’t taste too bad!!!
I’ve since read that HC can be self fertile.
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I have 3 apple trees that are supposed to be compatible with respect to blooming times (Pixie Crunch, HC, Gala), but with our warm winters their blooms tend not to sync up too well. I never see bees near the flowers anyways. I still got about a dozen apples from the Pixie Crunch and a couple from the Gala. All super small and they didn’t have any seeds. Still tasty, but more of a tease as they were so small. Pixie crunch is suposed to produce small apples, but these were ridiculusly small.
So I’m thinking that they still produced the fruit, even unfertilized. Just very very small. My HC finally bloomed this year after about four years of nothing. Nothing took however.
Don’t know how busy you are, but hand pollinating a few blossoms might be something you’d want to try if you never see any bees………….there are several YOUTUBE videos on the matter, Skillcult, Lubera, etc.
That was the only tree I have that bloomed. All my trees are very young. That one was a larger tree from a box store.
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I’ve hand pollinated passion fruit, dragon fruit, etc, but none of my apple trees bloomed at the same time despite all being on the orangepippin bloom group 4. We have relatively warm winters spiked by Santa Ana’s which will give us a week of 80 degree weather. Really confuses the apple trees.
Pollen could be stored and pollinate next year with it apparently. I even saw somewhere someone had pollen for sale over the internet. (I’m speaking of apple pollen…not the “bee pollen” that people eat as a nutrition or allergy aid.)
I will have to look into that, thank you. I’ve seen where people store dragonfruit pollen, so I imagine that the technique is similar.
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Also, flowering crabapple trees usually bloom ahead of fruiting trees. (Especially if yours are in bloom period “4” out of 5.)
So, if you could locate a big flowering apple tree and snip a branch off and bring to your place…there would be the pollen to get yours ‘fertilized’.
(Unless you’re breeding apples, in which case, you might not want the flowering crab apple genes.)
I do not know of any local crab apple trees and I’m sure that my neighbors would be less than thrilled if I snipped a bit of their tree (I do not personally know the people with the closest apple trees). But all good thoughts and ideas! Thank you again!