Yesterday I walked around and looked at how my trees and grafts were handling the scab that seems to have set in after copius amounts of rain.
I rated each tree and graft with a clear, light, medium, or heavy case of disfigured leaves. I guess my findings were not surprising, but I didn’t expect there to be such a difference depending on what tree the graft was on.
I’ll give you a few examples. Bite me, Stephens apple graft was completely clear on Jonathan but really bad on Virginia Beauty. Granny Smith grafts were clear on wolf River but covered with scab on McIntosh.
The worst looking leaves were grafts of chenango strawberry, tollman sweet, and Newtown Pippin. Some of the clearest–red fleshed apples like pekka, redfield, odysso, pink delight. Liberty, freedom, and Enterprise did well too, as expected. The limbertwigs mostly fell in the light scab spots, as did Ambrosia, wealthy, winter banana, among others.
Moderate scab was McIntosh, Arkansas black, honeycrisp, winecrisp, summer banana, jonagold, ashmeads kernel, and quite a few others.
My takeaway was that although certain varieties are more or less resistant, it depends a lot on the immediate disease pressure of that tree or nearby trees on how it’s going to perform. Some granny Smith grafts were clear and others looked pretty bad. The trees they were grafted to did have different amounts of scab but not enough to account for the significant differences, in my opinion.
Why do this ridiculous amount of review? I guess I just like to look at the trees in a variety of ways to see if it makes sense to me. I’m trying to figure out what trees perform best in my area, but it’s often not that simple.