Thank you for posting this article.
Yes, I think it is useful for anyone that suffers from corking with certain varieties, as I do in my own orchard. Looks like Pink Lady will be made worthless by it again this season- next year I try his methods.
I’m not even sure of where to begin with dosage and number of applications. I wonder if this might help the leaf issue as well.
Thanks for posting. Interesting read. Mangenese. Who would have thunk of that?
I have seen signed of bitter pit in some of my HC and corking in a few pears.
@alan, I usually fertilize my trees with 10-10-10 in the spring. Would that K exacerbate the bitter pit issue in HC?
That appears to be the gist of it. I’m going to stop putting down K on susceptible trees or at least test the soil to make sure K is in the lower moderate range. Also spray with chelated mag.
Would putting Epson salts around the tree help or do you have to spray with the chelated mag?
I wish we had a commercial fruit growing consultant to answer this. Based on the article I would guess that the chelated spray may be essential, but I will search further. This is apparently new information so the issue may not be resolved. For years there was debate about how much adding lime to the soil improved the calcium levels of fruit. It may be that the K issue was what muddied up the waters.
The easiest thing to do is avoid growing susceptible fruit- usually the really big apples, but Pink Lady is small and has real problems with corking on my site.
I fertilize my own orchard trees with my urine which may be too high in available K. I was already aware of this issue and have stopped applying this fertilizer to my bearing age apple trees, but so far, that hasn’t solved the issue.
I bought this Alpha Chemicals brand of manganese sulfate from Amazon. It doesn’t come with any application recommendations, so I had to do some research for that. The general recommendation is 1-3 teaspoons per gallon applied a week after petal fall. A second application two weeks later is optional, but not usually necessary.
For this year, I tried a single application at 1 tablespoon/gallon strength. I just used some HC out of storage and there is no bitter pit to be found. Of course this was a dry year, so I would like to see a wet one. Bitter pit tends to be worse when the ground is soggy for long periods. Previously I had bitter pit every year with HC, so it does look promising. It seemed like the leaves were a little better looking this year as well, but it is hard to tell based on memory. Since I have more manganese than I will ever need, I might try the optional second spray next year.
That’s strange, I wrote a reply to this this morning and it isn’t here. What I wrote is that I bought a jug packaged for commercial growers of foliar manganese and it wasn’t very expensive. Applied it on the calcium schedule (because the K is supposed to interfere with its absorption) along with the foliar calcium which is also not very expensive. I made about 3 summer apps on my trees and had clean HC for the first time as well as very little black rot on my HUGE Jonagolds. I just didn’t want to do a decent experiment and go manganese only on one tree- typical of my failures as a scientist. No discipline spoiled baby boomer.
“failures as a scientist”
If you did it right, you would treat half the trees in a dozen orchards and leave the other half as controls. Oh wait, that would be counterproductive. You didn’t plan for sap analysis which iirc, he recommended as the FIRST step in implementing a treatment program. Definitely baby boomer think. If a little bit is good, a whole lot is much better.
One of my 2 HC trees took the year off. There was no more than 2 dozen fruit on the whole tree, so I decided not to apply manganese to this tree. I sprayed the other tree, but didn’t get to the second application like I wanted to.
After one month of storage, the fruit from the non-treated tree have many brown sunken spots already. The fruit from the tree sprayed with manganese looks clean. I only found one small spot on one apple so far. This treatment method seems to work for me.
As a side note, this was the best tasting HC crop I’ve had so far and the only one that has met my expectations. It’s the 6th or 7th crop, which is twice as many as it usually takes. Most apple varieties don’t meet my expectations until around the 3rd crop. Golden Delicious types are the exception, in which the first crops usually taste as expected.
I’m not sure if the manganese treatments are contributing to flavor improvement, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Also, the leaves don’t seem to get as ugly as they have been in the past, but it could be just me.
Given the low cost of manganese, I would say it’s worth a try on any apples that have Bitter Pit issues.
I think our soil is naturally high in Potassium and low in Calcium. No wonder the Honeycrisp are worthless. This year they were big and many. Young trees nearby need water, and this tree is mature. We also had extreme weather.
Hi Alan,
This year my Honeycrisp fruited for the first time. It was very productive but the fruit was very substandard with the core hollowed out leaving a hole around each stem. I have never seen this in my other apples and it does not appear to be caused by an insect. I am debating to just topwork it to a better variety, but saw your posting. I read articles on corking and bitter pit, but I am not certain my these symptoms fit what I am experiencing. Do you have pics of your deformed fruits?
Dennis
Here’s a whole library of apple rots with lots of photos of Honeycrisp apples. honeycrisp rot photos at DuckDuckGo
Thanks Alan,
I think I need to apply calcium and managanese as a foliar spray next year to see if it can solve my issue. I found chelated managanese at Home Depot and I read that a foliar spray with calcium can be made from calcium nitrate:
“Calcium nitrate fertilizer can be used as a foliar spray. This is most effective in treating and preventing blossom end rot but also cork spot and bitter pit in apples. … For a foliar spray to correct calcium deficiency and add nitrogen, add 1 cup of calcium nitrate to 25 gallons of water.”
I could not find any information on whether it will burn plants?
How do you prepare your calcium sprays?
Dennis
FYI this is fairly inexpensive and only requires a small amount per gallon. Should last a very long time…
The timing of the calcium spray may not coincide with when I would want foliar nitrogen as it is done as a summer spray when you really aren’t wanting to hype up vegetative growth in established trees. I think its a better idea to use something like this.
Of course, agricultural suppliers have it in less expensive packages.
I’m not sure about that CalMag product because it doesn’t say if it is for foliar application. Truth is, I prefer buying from an agricultural supplier so I don’t have any doubt that the chemistry is right for the purpose I have need of, so I’m even a little concerned about Nutrical because the companies that sell it are all geared towards non-professionals. .
Agree about the nitrogen
I think Wendall also has a good solution
Thanks
Dennis
Alan said it right, use your own urine, always available. I use a more Omri chemical product, only use manganese on my persimmon. How big is your orchard?