Jessica,
I am in zone 6 a. Last fall, I let my GR hung on the tree until temp dropped to around 25 F. I picked them then. I think people say we could let it hang on until it is 21 F.
I’ve stored them in a frige and eaten them once in a while including a couple of them last week. The apples were not fully ripe judging from the color of the seeds. They tasted very good, sweeter but the texture was not as crisp as when they were first picked. I was told that apples stored better/longer when picked not fully ripe.
However, I don’t know how much the south wall would help your tree considering you are two zones lower.
That’s normal. It can be washed off. It has no flavor that I can detect and I don’t think it is harmful. I think it is sooty blotch and maybe fly spec in there too. Spray will eliminate it but I wouldn’t bother to spray just for that.
Goldrush is the most susceptible apple to sooty blotch and fly speck I’ve ever grown. Many varieties can be kept pretty pristine with only a couple of summer fungicide sprays, but Goldrush requires about 6.
Sure the ugly stuff is tasteless but once you have tons of apples it’s nice to be able to give them away to an appreciative audience. Don’t dismiss the value of appearance, it’s easy to love ugly apples when you are the mother, but folks who only eat commercial apples may be pretty picky.
I sprayed my GR 4 times (once per month) with bonide fruit tree and plant guard this summer. It eliminated sooty blotchy fly speck, and nearly eliminated all rots. With no sprays nearly every single GR will rot here. Zip loc bagging also stops sooty blotchy and fly speck, but they get too much sunburn and tend to ripen early so I switched to spraying.
My GR are starting to ripen here. I’ve had a few so far. Very good apple and these are not fully ripe yet. These are early drops that are mostly green with a little bit of yellow showing. It’ll be a few more weeks before they turn more yellow and flavor improves.
I use a sticking agent as well with the Bonide Fruit Tree and Plant Guard. This seems to be the best fruit tree spray I have used and does a good job. The instructions say not to use it more than 4 times a year. That is why I was asking. At times I need to use it more often, simply for the fact that at times the season starts early or runs late for the weather. Plus the rain that we sometimes get. At times we get 2-3" of rain at a time in the spring at times several times in a week or two. I had a product with Captan and Malathion in it I was using late in the season if I felt I needed it, for any problems. It was called Fruit Tree Spray.
That seemed to work great for getting decent fruit. If I deviated from that system the fruit did not turn out very good.
That was why U was asking if you sued anything else with the Bonide Fruit Tree and Plant Guard product.
My first spray is in late May and my last is in late August. This is really only the second year I’ve been spraying but so I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but so far the four week interval between sprays has not been a problem. I have been pleasantly surprised that long of an interval was able to knock out the rots on one of my most susceptipble varieties. I was even thinking of backing off to every six weeks next summer. I did see a bit of rot this year very early on sugesting that there were some infection periods before my first spray, but since then I have seen almost no rot at all. October here can be on the dry side so I have not seen rot show up between my last spray and harvest from mid-oct to mid-nov on goldrush.
Here’s a test of bagging vs spraying vs doing nothing that I ran last year. Its only one tree and one year, but the results are very consistent with what I have seen over the years at least with bagging vs no bagging. Glomerella (bitter rot) is rampant here. I think I’m sitting on a pretty good proving ground for bitter rot treatments as are a few others on here. We average about an inch of rain per week here in AL during the summer but frequently get long stretches in which we get daily afternoon thunderstorms.
I’m one of the others. A heavy crop of goldrush set this year, and every single apple rotted, despite multiple fungicide sprays. I had planned to use Captan next year but based on your experience will probably use Bonide Fruit Tree and Plant Guard. Thanks for finding a solution to this problem. Do you know if that fungicde combination is available without the insecticide, at a reasonable price? I know Pristine has the same active ingredients but I’m not willing to spend several hundred dollars just to spray a couple of Goldrush trees.
The Bonide liquid contains .246 pounds of pyraclostrobin per gallon. The liquid Headline contains 2.08 pounds of pyraclostrobin per gallon. A gallon of Bonide is $192. Two and half gallons of Headline is $499 for a product that contains 8.5 times the strength of Bonide per gallon.
With all the home & garden sprays, the active ingredient is greatly reduced as consumers spray to runoff. Commercial products are applied at a very low volume of wate barely wetting the leaf. An average homeowner spraying Headline would end with up toxic residues trying to spray fruit trees.
More rot on sprayed and bagged vs not sprayed and bagged could be due to many things such as random variarion, variability associated with which side of the tree its on (ie natural light levels and dryness), or could be an interaction with spraying. The sprayed side of the tree had a LOT more foliage because the glomeralla also causes the leaves to drop. More foliage could lead to longer wetting periods due to shading and therefore more rot.
I had no replication in my trial, so extrapolating to another tree or the same tree in another year should be done with caution but this trial was definitely enough info to justify pulling the trigger on switching from bagging to spraying for this year. The switch has gone well so far and my apples are almost to the finish line. Of course we could get a wet spell and they could all still rot, or critters could take them all. Honestly, they are probably close enough to ripe that I could pick them now but I want to let them yellow up a bit more.
Sorry to hear that @haldog. What did you spray? GR is a big time rotter at least around these parts. I know Scott Smith and many others have had very little rot with GR, but we must have some extraordinary glomerella pressure around here.
That bonide product is not cheap. I think the 16 oz bottle is ~$30 and I use about 2/3 of the bottle with the four sprays each year. I think buying a jug of pristine would be cheaper in the long run assuming it is shelf stable.
I have not found a homeowner product with pristine. I don’t really need the insecticide either - I have minimal PC (they are too busy on the peaches), no apple maggot, no coddline moth, etc,etc. So I guess I should be happy about that as I deal with the rot.
A couple of sprays of myclobutanil which does indeed knock out the otherwise very severe cedar apple rust, a couple of sprays of Southern Ag Garden Friendly Fungicide, which is Bacilus amyliliquefacianes D747, and a couple of sprays of Regalia. Complete failure in rot prevention on Goldrush. Worked pretty well on all of my other apples.
It’s my biggest rotter by far. As you noted, it isn’t just the fruit, the tree will lose most of its leaves.
A tree ripened Goldrush is one of my favorite apples, so I’ll probably spend the $30 on the Bonide product. At least it has a shot at being effective, unlike what I did this year.
