I am authoring an article intended for publication on the subject of “Disease Resistant Apple Trees For Wildlife”. (that article was downloaded to this post for you to access). I have shared with the growers that are profiled (those that either specialize in fruit trees for wildlife or those who carry many disease resistant cultivars). Those growers are in the process of providing feedback.
I thought prior to submission for publication I’d seek feedback from a wider group of knowledgeable commentators. I am particularly interested in the following:
Correction of any clear errors
Relevant information that might be missing
Omitted disease resistant apple trees that are available from some accessible source?
Any growers or nurseries that should have been included (please don’t inundate me with suggestions unless they clearly cater to wildlife applications or happen to carry a wider selection of apple trees that are very disease resistant).
Other relevant input.
Please do not publish, circulate, or quote from the proposed article because this is only a first draft. I’ll post the completed article on this site when it is ready for wider circulation.
Nice job, you clearly have put a great deal of work into this!
My main comment is that unsprayed trees will get a lot of curculio and moths and then they will be particularly susceptible to fruit summer rots at all of those injury sites. Most apples don’t have good rot resistance. It could be that you don’t see so much of that where you are but here in Maryland the whole tree can turn to mush balls. On your favorites list I personally have found Hudson’s, Claygate, Grimes, and Harrison to be very susceptible to rot for example. So it’s probably too late to add now but for my climate I would love to also see summer rot ratings.
I may need to add an additional section to my proposed article or possibly write a separate article devoted to summer rots. I did a quick search after reading your suggestion, and about all I found online was a thread on this very site. Can you suggest any authoritative sources for learning about the most rot resistant trees?
Scotts apple reports are somewhat extensive and goes into rots. I’ve noticed that virtually every publication tends to skip that subject. In my opinion rots are more important than most of the listed issues. If you can’t harvest anything the tree is a freeloader.
I think the issue with rots is the official lists are for commercial growers who are killing all the bugs and then doing their biweekly cover sprays all summer to prevent rot. If you are spraying like that you won’t have big rot issues. This summer for the first time I used an anti-rot spray on the apples and I even stopped mid-June since I broke my collarbone, but I am still getting almost no rot; it is only on badly damaged fruits.
Since none of the standard apple disease lists have it you would have to do the legwork to make your own, and just start with many “??” and hope it slowly fills out over time. If you posted an initial list here I’m sure you will get lots of good feedback. Some of the people with their own deer apple lists may also have some knowledge that they did not yet make public.
Great article! Wish I had started with the list 3 years ago! At least in the ~70 cultivars I have a few that might survive (I have two of each in the first table). Can you comment on preference in root stock? I grafted everything onto Anna antonovka since I want the scaffolds to be fairly high up.
After having 2 Golden Delicious and a Fuji planted for wildlife for the last 12 or so years in an agricultural area, I don’t think it works for the deer as intended. Yes, I know they are not disease resistant. I think the raccoons, opossums and squirrels are getting the fruit long before the fruit drop. Just this morning I visited the trees which were without any fruit. Saw a buck in the nearby field but I’m sure that he was much more interested in the soybeans.
CWD is also a factor as small food plantings are discouraged.
My deer love the native persimmons and so do the beers. I wouldn’t waste my time planting apples for deer in the hot humid south. Better chance by far to actually have fruit for deer from a persimmon tree.
Minor visual notes from left field – some of the color pairings in the charts will be pretty hard to read for some folks. When you get down dark red, blue or purple background table cells it’s good to flip to white text. And you might want to alphabetize within table groups. And what are the color meanings in the Century Orchard section?
I have very little personal experience or direct knowledge. I’m really just getting started with my Apple tree efforts. In the last few years I have planted a few hundred Apple and Crabapple trees, but they are young. My knowledge is limited to what I can read and some input from growers I have been corresponding with.
Ryan Haines of Blue Hill Wildlife Nursery uses Dolgo Crabapple root-stock I believe, as does Luke Miller of Midwest Deer Trees. St Lawrence Nurseries I believe uses Antonovka I believe because it is especially cold hardy. Any standard root-stock I gather is preferable to semi-standard root-stock at least for wildlife applications.
The colors were used throughout the article to denote how strong the resistance was. Red very susceptible, Orange susceptible green moderately susceptible. light blue resistant, dark blue very resitant, purple immune
I used Luna or Merivon. They are both highly rated for apple rots.
Back on the original topic, there are probably some people out there with real world experience with neglected orchards who have a lot of data on how various varieties do. The only really reliable data for how a neglected tree will do is… how a neglected tree did. The various neglected apple trees I have found are often doing much better than I would have suspected, probably because their survival alone meant they were well adapted. But I usually could not tell what variety it was.