Icky Apple Trunk

Had a grower in India send these photos of some icky black stuff on the trunk of his apple tree.

I don’t recognize it, but I’m sure he doesn’t want it. Whack the tree 6" below the infection?


Probably the best remedy is the one you describe.

Cutting out the infection and using another tree’s bark for a bridge graft is too complicated and too risky, even for an expert.

I concur, a canker of some sort. Even that drastic of surgery may not save it.

looks like the same problem I had with my Anna apple…not sure if it was a canker or what. I did some pretty drastic surgery on mine replanted it and it’s doing pretty well.

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Am I seeing right? or in the second picture is that wire on the top left coming from behind the tree going right thru the trunk and wrapping around to the right? or is that just the way the photo looks.

Those are all strings pulling the branches horizontal, required in the tropics to prevent the branches from growing straight up 10 or 12 feet.

That string is probably tied to the blue stake.

He started this tree from seed, and has a lot of other seedlings started in pots, hoping to graft onto them some day when he can get some scionwood.

Given the circumstances, I believe I would keep the infected tree as long as it produces usable apples. It may live longer than expected. If the apples are good the scion wood on the infected tree might be used to graft some new trees.

The tree is just a seedling planted from Red Delicious seeds from the supermarket, he was intending to graft something onto it in the future. Most of the neighbors have never seen an apple tree, and are urging him to keep it.

I think it will recover OK from getting whacked, it seems to have plenty of vigor.

Hi Kevin,

How do you come across these people? Any other forum?

They find me. I have a nursery that specializes growing apple trees in hot climates and the tropics. There’s not a lot of places in the world to find this type of information, and I get emails from all over the place.

There are many guys like this one in the tropics who discover that they can sprout seeds from a supermarket apple and then plant it out in the back yard, and it continues to grow every year despite what all the books and their local university tells them. Their dream is to someday graft a good variety on it and have an apple tree for eating.

There are apple growers scattered all around the tropics, but for the most part they’ve worked in isolation, with zero cultural information available to them for growing apples in the rural tropics. It is amazing what they’ve figured out all on their own. As more and more of them get access to internet through their phones, a horticultural revolution is slowly taking place, much like the green revolution did when improved varieties,commercial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides became available.

We’ve been able to take the lessons from growers in India (such as the Pusa cool chamber) and pass it on to Africa, and back the other way too. Apples in the USA used to be grown commercially in the hot and humid South much more than they are now, and we send those lessons and varieties to the worldwide tropics. We may learn more from a poor farmer in Congo than we do from Jules Janick at Purdue (who has been most supportive, by the way). All I can say is that it’s the finger of God that I’ve been able to be a part of it.

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