You can train any rootstock to any height you want, but it does take some effort. As far as pruning, if you aren’t growing fruit commercially, pruning isn’t onerous for many gardeners. You can do a lot of it when there aren’t other gardening tasks in winter and very early spring and it helps create a more intimate relationship with your trees. You built that!
I use ladders because deer can’t.
I have several times had apple trees on 111 completely root girdled by pine voles when small to where the roots are chewed down to scraped nubs and they have survived after I staked them up.
I don’t see a lot of love for Holstein here. Complaints include watercore problems that turned apples to mush or less severely a texture too soft. Another complaint was too many drops.
I haven’t had those problems, but I shared a problem that another reported that it took a long time for first fruiting. For us, in its first couple years of bearing, there were only one to three apples. That makes it hard to pick at the right time, and I didn’t yet. This year we have at least a dozen (that is actually good for us this year after we were hit by a late frost), and I am being patient and have not picked yet. I will pick soon, and I’m hoping it will finally prove to have its own distinct and more than decent flavor reminiscent of Cox.
Voles are really getting on my nerves, they have become my number one critter problem in my new orchard. I have very high pressure of them, and they are digging tunnels everywhere in my yard, which are hard to see under grass and mulch. I have a dozen of poison-baited traps around the orchard, and I poison their tunnels, but their fast reproduction and prevalence in my neighbors yards makes them difficult to combat. Yes, they don’t steal fruits but they can kill or stunt trees…
pine or meadow? Pine voles eat the roots, and meadows the trunks.
“I use ladders because deer can’t”
Great quote.
How long have you had the Holstein apple trees in the ground?
Planted in 2015 on M111.
they are very bad here last year. killed a cherry and a honeyberry. it could have been worse. they both came back from the roots.
Pine voles. Tons of tunnels in my lawn, and ones in the orchard go directly to tree roots. I saw one tunnel coming from the lawn into the orchard and then branching inside the orchard with each branch going to a different tree. The most affected trees are ones on the border of the orchard because they are too close to the lawn and it is hard to see the tunnels. Some tunnels are deep enough not to prefixes above ground bulge, and hence are hard to detect.
I wish I can buy some garden snakes and let them loose in my orchard.
I have pretty good luck trapping them in the fall under trays with spring traps baited with peanuts. In the fall they come to the surface for food.
What’s the clearance between the tray and the ground? Tray dimensions?
it just has to be tall enough to allow the traps to snap shut and you can dig a bit into the soil to allow that if needed. I have the black trays that are sometimes used for mixing small batches of cement that I use for my plant starts in the spring, which are pretty deep. 6.5" deep 24" long by 18" wide. I stick 4 traps in there and will trap everything in the immediate vicinity within 3 days. I move the traps about 6’ when I stop trapping them. I have over 2 acres of nursery so it will spend all of November clearing them out with about 10 trays and 40 traps.
Time to get some rat terrier cross of dog…
Unfortunately dogs are not an option for me, cats maybe, but has to stay outside.
I am glad you said November, as peanut butter will attract raccoons, and I don’t want any raccoons in my yard while I still have fruit on my trees.
I’ll try to give it a shot this year.
I use whole peanuts in a trap like this
I kill raccoons by trapping them with marshmallow bait in live traps and shooting them with a high powered pellet gun slightly above the meeting of their eyes.
Someone sent me this site, a humorous take on ranking apples written purely from an eating, not growing, perspective and focusing on newer varieties.
I think a lot of the varieties described are not available to backyard growers yet. But it’s noteworthy which older varieties rank high on the list such as Pink Lady, Gold Rush, Honeycrisp, and Braeburn.
@pine I bookmarked that website last year, but for the life of it, I couldn’t find SweeTango apples anywhere. I finally bought a load of SweeTango at Whole Foods in the past few weeks. Very flavorful apple, not dense, light and crispy. Probably one of the best flavored apples I had in recent memory. The problem with this apply is that it gets dented so easily. I had to literally sift through hundreds of apples to find ones that weren’t damaged. But simply the motion of the cashier gently placing the bags of apples in paper bags dented some of them. They’re exaggeratedly delicate. I simply can’t picture anymore growing these in their backyard for how delicate they are.
I’ve noticed both honeycrisp and cosmic crisp having that problem to some degree although it sounds like SweeTango must be worse. I bet it’s a natural outcome of having flesh that’s very crispy and not dense. Also, that name really is awful. But still, now I want to try one.