As I was out pruning wild crabapple trees today I came upon a red cedar that I hadn’t seen before. It is no longer standing.
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Why do you prune the crabs? Do you harvest the fruit?
like with anything you still need to make sure you thin the branches, so each get good airflow and sun penetration. heavily shaded interior branches will stop producing flower spurs and that will work against spring beauty or pollination whichever is your goal.
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Because I struggle with allowing nature to take it’s course.
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This is what my Gold Rush looked like late summer… growing about 50 ft from a couple big red cedars.
It started as little rusty spots and grew into larger bullseye looking spots. It did not loose leaves… but looked nasty.
Hudson Golden Gem and Akane and my Early McIntosh get a few small rusty spots but not nearly as bad and did not develop into bullseye. It is hardly noticable on them but GR does not like red cedars at all.
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I’ve heard that in some areas the wind can carry the CAR spores for a very long distance, so unless your entire area has no cedars, cutting down one cedar may be of little help. My cedars in the windbreak had the orange slime about a week ago. I may be too late, but I’ll try spraying to break the 2 year “Jack & Jill” cycle.
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@EJJ — I have lots of cedars on my property… and even if I cut all of mine down… I have a couple of neighbors and one who’s property is just across the road from mine… and he has cedars all along the road and in the woods too.
No getting away from them here… I just need trees that can deal with it.
I have a NovaMac now… which is supposed to be Very Resistant to CAR.
My Early Mcintosh, Akane and Hudson Golden Gem are just very lightly affected by CAR.
My Gold Rush does not like Cedar… and it has some Fire Blight too this year… may be too wimpy for my TN climate and conditions.
Have you considered using one of those systemic not safe for edible fungicides on the closest Cedars?
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I haven’t. Sadly, somewhat since they are nice trees, red cedar are all over my area. Thankfully even when affected my trees seem to weather the infection pretty well.
To reduce the desease pressure you would only need to treat the closest trees. Sure there would always be spores floating in but at least the factory wont be as close.
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I have them all over my place but it never seems to do much harm to the apples.
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That is actually a great idea that I really need to look into. But the good news is that last year I had my giant cedar tree that was right by my orchard removed, and it did help. There is still cedars in my general area but they are several hundred yards away. I know that is still close enough for problems, but the big one I had removed was 15 feet from my orchard! So things are a bit better these days. But I need to look into those stronger fugicides that aren’t for edibles.
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Just wanted to put up a picture of early spore bodies on an apple fruitlet. This apple is a chestnut crab apple.
The fruits end up malformed and clearly wont be making it to harvest.
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That’s a real bad case
My own fault. Non-resistant cultivars, high pressure environment, the weather gods were against me, and I wasn’t informed and proactive in my spray. Thankfully the tree seems healthy enough. My other trees had fire blight hits and are years younger. I’ll take rust over blight.
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That’s fersure!
It’s been wet here but still no galls on the cedars, so I’ll have to be doing more spray, even after I finished the round for the scab. Some seasons, the same spray covers both problems.