The Liberty produces lots of flowers, how is it for fruit production?
This is my first disease resistant apple. I never got into them because I had heard disease resistant apples are not as good tasting as the big-name apples.
Over the last 18 years I have planted about a dozen varieties or more of the big-name apples. All have been disappointing. All have disease, all produce sporadically and poorly. Of course, I wild craft them, meaning I do nothing for them except water in drought periods.
I kept some of these apples, nature took some, I pulled out others. I planted a Zestar apple around 2010…I have yet to get one apple from it. Some years it may produce a handful of apples, but they disappear before they are ripe.
This year I decided to try a Liberty disease resistant apple. I figured I got nothing left to lose for apples. All of the big-name apples have been very disappointing.
This is a 7 gal 7-foot-tall Liberty apple. Price is $60. In 2008 apple trees cost $36 for the same size tree from the same producer.
They produce very heavily and require extensive thinning. But they’re codling moth magnets, and my experience is that if you don’t spray you won’t get apples!
Agreed; I learned really quickly that CM goes after Liberty at petal fall so I hit with Surround or bag fast. When I didn’t do that, Liberty attracted CM before any of my other trees and I only got a few clean fruit.
Is there a true maintenance free apple out there? One that is bug resistant, disease resistant and actually produces apples and said apples are half ass edible.
Near downtown there is a wild apple tree. At least that is what I was told. It is a mid-size yellow delicious type of apple. The story they told me goes like this. A worker at the factory would throw out his apple core after lunch each day. Eventually an apple tree grew from it.
Thet tree is huge, it is loaded with apples every year and no one does a thing for it. I’ve thought about taking up grafting trees just to get a baby tree from it.
Amazing! This Zestar has only grown half ass for its age. It is tall, but very thin all around. It gets sun, so don’t know what the deal is.
I’m not a sprayer, I only wild craft my trees. If it does not produce fruit…it is out of here. But I left this one alone and keep hoping things will change. Plus, it is on a neighbor’s property. He let me plant a few trees on the border when I ran out of room.
Most of the trees I planted on his property were experimental and did not work out. Hence, I do not want to ask about putting in more when the old ones did not work out. So leaving the useless Zestar alone.
Do you know what rootstock the Zestar is on? Zestar does like to grow vertically vs. horizontally. It is by far the tallest apple tree I have, but it does branch nicely with decent crotch angles naturally. My tree is on standard rootstock, probably Dolgo (Bailey’s Nursery tree)
As far as Liberty goes, my tree produces heavily but fruit is very attractive to birds for some reason. I’d guess the deep red coloration.
Conversely I’d probably get good fruit from my Arkansas Black even if I didn’t bag/Surround it. The CM damage is often superficial because the fruitlets are very dense. I think it will depend on your pressure level. AB also tolerates disease pressure pretty well in my experience in a couple different locations. All of this depends on how pretty you want your fruit.
I have a branch of Yellow (not goldern) Delicious that that is pretty trouble free, even when other varieties on the same frankentree are getting hammered by codling moth.
But here in western Montana we have a fairly arid climate and aside from a little powdery mildew now and then we’re not much bothered, so far, by anything else. I usually spray dormant oil once or twice a year and then four sprays of Spinosad supplemented with Triazicide.
Heh. I brought home a Hollybrook Liberty tree 4 years ago. It started flowering in the pot a week later. Another week after that the entire tree was dead from fireblight. It shocked me considering its supposed disease resistance.
I grafted a Liberty this year on g.890 so we’ll see how well it does this time around.
There are no zero maintenance apples out there. If you pick apples that have wide range disease resistance you can reduce the work needed. But you still have to deal with insects and animals that eat apples. And you still need to train and prune the trees.
Having said that the maintenance requirements can be pretty low if you choose good cultivar/rootstock combinations, learn a bit about diseases and insects that attack apples, and learn a bit about training trees and pruning.
Disease resistant apples can taste good just like non-disease resistant apples. In fact some of the old heirlooms that have good disease resistance ( many don’t) are among some of the best tasting apples out there.
Take a look at this post and the rest of the thread. It will help you understand how to get good crops and take care of your trees.
i just grafted a apple from a tree I’ve been eating apples from for a few years now. its on the edge of the road about 70mi. south of me. we went through there last month and i was able to grab some scions from it. all the apples on that tree were clean as far as i could see. its in the middle of nowhere so I’m sure it isn’t sprayed. looks a lot like a smaller zestar. a whitish apple with red streaks. at 1st i thought it a sport of y. transparent but it’s a crisp apple that ripens a month after y. transparent. grafted it on my redlove odysso. hope fully it takes. i call it the limestone apple from the township it grows on. there are several other wild apples i know of that are worthy of grafting due to bug/ disease resistance and quality of fruit . just need to be in the area when they’re dormant to get wood from them.
My wife and I found a roadside apple fall of '23. The fruit were free of bugs and disease and so were the leaves, and the apples were delicious. I’m guessing the cleanliness was due to the fact no other apple trees were in the area. In fact, no other trees of any kind were much closer than 100 yards.
We’ll find out if the fruit is naturally free of disease and bugs when the specimens I’ve grafted produce fruit. I’m guessing not since the trees will be grown in orchard settings where bugs and disease already exist.
My Liberty on semi-dwarf rootstock is about 15 years old. It has never had a touch of any disease on it here in southern Indiana that I have seen. It would be perfect if only the bugs didn’t like it so much.
It fruits very heavily every year, and must be thinned. I tried not spraying and almost every fruit had a crescent shaped scar from plum curculio bite on it when I tried to thin the bitten fruit out.
I guess I will have to break down and spray this year if I want any decent fruit. Not sure if I have codling moth here or not. All I really notice are those crescent shaped scars. If only there were some disease or predator that would significantly thin out that plum curculio insect, but, so far, that has not happened and I am not holding my breath for it. It has happened for me with Japanese Beetles. There used to be many more all around here, but in the last few years, I have seen very few and very little damage. I wonder if the many birds around here have taken a liking to them?
Sandra
I have 15 newer varieties in two pots. They are just breaking bud. Two are liberty apples and today they had some strange bugs on them. I’ve never seen those bugs before. Upon closer inspection of the 15, only the two Liberty apple grafts had the bugs. So when people here say liberty is a bug magnet, I believe them.
Sometimes you may find an apple , or other type of fruit, that may look great and be a great apple were it is found. However, once the apple is moved from that location it is introduced to other diseases and insects that not have been around the tree in its original location. Then the apple is no better disease or insect resistant than any other apple.
Yes. Location matters. In Southern Georgia it is far safer to say there is no such thing as a disease resistant fruit. Everything will get something if left untreated.
Which is also why especially flavorful fruit is worth it. If you are going to spray/treat anyway; why limit your palette?
Mark may I ask what your mixture is? I’m using both those products (Spinosad and Triazicide) for the first time and after the rain today, would love to do my first application this weekend. Thank you.
Liberty and Enterprise are the two apples that never fail to produce fruit. They’re both about 20 years old now, and so that’s been about 15 years worth of dependable fruit. I like the Enterprise fruit a lot more than Liberty, which I find kind of tasteless, even after months of cold storage. But neither have been bothered by any diseases, and CM hasn’t been too big of a problem in the middle of the city.
