@ItmaybejjThose look awful! (Please don’t take that personally, OK?) LOL
My King Davids have some damage, too . . . but not as much as the ones you posted. I did spray a few times, but am paying for not spraying more - especially early on.
Mine are very small. Are yours? Last year they had pretty good taste. This year . . . bland.
Seems that none of my ‘macintosh’ type apples are doing very well, here. (taste-wise) Enterprise stinks. So does Liberty. Early Mac and Monark look beautiful in other members’ pictures . . . not mine. My Cortland graft is one of the oldest - but has never even produced one apple.
If I didn’t spray at all - I’m sure many of my varieties would look just like your King Davids. I question the validity of ‘organic’ on many fruit stands’ signs. I really do, after trying to grow bug and disease free fruit without spraying. And it’s aggravating when you offer to share some fruit with someone, and they ask “are they organic”? But, then they turn their noses up when my fruit doesn’t look ‘perfect’, because it didn’t get sprayed . . . and they need to cut away the nasty stuff !
I wonder how many consumers confuse ‘organic’ with ‘no spray’. Many would be my guess… If they only knew how much more spray typically happens with OMRI (organic).
They were hilariously small due to all the damage. I’m assuming stink bugs or something; whatever it is that takes one point bite and then leaves a woody spot the apple has to grow around. The slice I was able to steal from each was delicious though. And the tree is reasonably healthy even with all the disease pressure.
I’m just growing for myself so I don’t mind a moderate amount of damage; like, I’ve learned that one or two fungicide sprays for peaches is nonnegotiable here, but that’s all I need to have enough acceptable fruit. So I’ll start searching this forum for low spray schedule tips.
My very early apples do pretty good, so I’m hoping I might get away with one or two sprays of something.
You could try bagging, but even that usually requires Spinosad organic spray until the June drop, then the Ziplock bagging, or about 3/4 of your bags will end up on the ground or blowing around the neighborhood. I learned that the hard way. The Surround spray until time to bag wasn’t very effective and bothered my nose when trying to bag them with the Surround on them. Some people don’t care to use plastic on them, either.
A type of apple aphid can do that. You can try tanglefoot on the lower trunk before bloom. Seemed to work for me after having the same deformed fruit one year. Now do it routinely.
Ziploc bags were shown to release micro plastics from the friction of each opening and closing. So your fruit is now contaminated with brain clogging particles.
Heh yeah my one experiment with that ended with hundreds of bags in the neighbor’s yard. They were well stapled; the squirrels just found them to be a very convenient takeout container.
I’ll ponder the tanglefoot. Will need some sort of bird protection if I recall.
And a Sierra Beauty I picked to try. Lots of my apples have sunburn and codling moth damage this year. I set up some molasses traps this year but didn’t realize they went completely dry from evaporation at some point this summer.
Here is the Apple I grew as Grimes Golden for 6 years. This is the first year I got some fruit. Does it look like Grimes Golden to you all or something else ?
Picked dolgo crab this morning. These were a spring planting and are new to me. Looking forward to future cider blending. I got about a quart this year.
There are good years and there are bad ones. And apparently this is the year when our Golden Delicious compensates for last year’s disaster crop of tiny apples that looked like they had been hit with birdshot.
We had to pick it 1.5 - 2 months early, but that seems to be this year’s normal.
