I don’t think it will hurt anything, but I’m not convinced it is helpful long enough to make a difference for the effort to do it.
I’m of the opinion that providing generally favorable conditions like biodiversity, sufficient water, mulch etc will be more beneficial than proactive spraying. If all the other things are being done and compost tea is icing on the cake, then by all means knock yourself out.
I’d rather take time to add more mulch than mess with bubble tea but I could be convinced otherwise with good data.
You might want to think again about dwarfing rootstocks. I got G890 and G210, which are only SD’s, and I checked with David Lockwood, U of Tenn’s horticulture expert of many years. He thought they were fine, looked good in Tennesse plantings. A couple years later I poked around on the internet and found a discussion titled “Geneva Curveballs”, in which various well known Nafexers talked about failed grafts on Geneva rootstocks beside other rootstocks that did fine. Of course, with Claude up there in Quebec (I think it is) and me down here in Tenn, things like winter dont’ worry me. Except there are those M106 rootstocks that SOME people insist on using that don’t like heavy clay and may be damaged by sudden freezes. If there’s one thing you can predict about our weather here, it’s that it’s unpredictable! (The last 6 weeks of rain, hasn’t that been fun???)
So what I’m finding is that some scions really like the Geneva rootstocks, and some don’t. Trailman loves it, and so does 'Striped June". (Don’t sneer, there’s not even a speck of CAR on my Striped Junes, while ‘Smokehouse’ 30 ft away is liberally speckled!) My idea was to keep the S June smallish so I could thin enough to combat it’s biennial cropping addiction.
‘Kinnard’s Choice’ is doing Ok, and my one ‘King David’ graft is growing well. Oh, and Yates wants to grow well, if I can just get a strip plowed at the new property and get it out of the pot! But ‘Monark’ and ‘Early Mac’, which I really, really, really want nice big trees of, will hardly grow. One Monark died last year, and the other is pretty wimpy. I have some M111’s in pots, have thought of setting pots beside my languishing little trees and doing approach grafts, just to hedge my bets. I think when it’s all said and done, that I will take my old neighbor’s advice and graft on seedlings. Anyone have Dolgo to send me seeds of?
And back to the no spray aspect. Decades ago in Pomona someone in the mid Atlantic region said they had 2 trees of the same variety, but the M111 tree did great, while the M7 tree was sickly. If you guys grow tomatoes and squash, you know that sometimes you just have to have vigorous fast growing plants to outgrow pests and diseases. Would I rather have wimpy trees that I gaze at in despair and wonder how to speed them up enough to have good scions to PUT THEM ON A VIGOROUS ROOTSTOCK? Or would I rather have put them on a vigorous rootstock to begin with, and have to get out there and hack and prune viciously in winter and feed the prunings to the goats, and have so many apples dropping in summer that I don’t know what to do with them all?
Sorry, after 30 years of bad soil and wimpy rootstocks, I may just get a little bit worked up over the subject!
As I type this, my ‘Monark’ on micromalus has two apples on it that I hope to harvest before the squirrels find them. True, the voles absolutely won’t touch micromalus, but it’s sure not a vigorous enough stock for here. Meanwhile what I think is ‘Harvest Queen’ pear has numerous pear cores on the ground. The tree took forever to crop, and now is oh, maybe 20 ft tall, and so much surrounded by other trees that there is no hope of them ripening before the squirrels eat them all. But it is big and vigorous enough to be cropping without my help!
As a follow-up to my 2021 post about re-grafting all of my apple varieties from M111 to M111/G41 or M111/BUD9 interstem. Most of the original M111 trees remain, interspersed in what are new rows of the IS trees. Most of the IS ones are staked but only with bamboo and string. I remain hopeful that that will not be necessary as they perhaps hit the 6 or 7 year old point. Some are fairly sturdy now and would probably be free-standing without any extra support. The extremes of Hurricane Helene tested this though, a dozen or more were blown over completely. Some lay at a fairly harsh bend radius… But all held and no graft unions were broken.
15 varieties on M111 will fruit this year, as well as 14 IS ones. Ages of the M111 trees are 6 to 10, and 4 to 5 for the IS trees. So the more dwarfing interstock certainly helped contribute to precociousness.
I’ve also switched from an “Organic” or Holistic spray regimen to more synthetic. Two ingredients in my tank, Myclobutanil as the fungicide and a synthetic Pyrethroid for insect pests. Very little if any CAR lesions are visible, but there is a bit of scab affecting a handful of fruits across maybe 4 or 5 cultivars. The least amount of obvious insect damage in my ~10 year experience. Very few curculio stings and leaves are generally all large, very green/healthy, without much obvious insect damage.
That was a one-time experiment where I sprayed the newer IS trees with a Michael Phillips “holistic” recipe and left all of the ones grafted directly to M111 to fend for themselves. Across those 20+ trees, all mostly distinct heirloom varieties, effectively all had CAR lesions. I’m doubtful any apple cultivar would thrive “no-spray” in my local growing conditions… Synthetic spraying is less effort, less often, and I’ve tried to choose active ingredients which don’t soak into the fruit and will wash off of the surface. At least my understanding of what I’m using now is that that is the case…
I’ve mentioned in another thread as well, that Wooly Apple Aphid attacks M111 here with a vengeance. Underground on the roots, with none on the G41 IS portion which is also partially buried and has roots. I know some people have reported graft failures with G41 and other Geneva rootstocks… Mine are all W&T and so far I’ve had zero graft breaks. Fingers crossed.
What, what!!! WAA on M111??? Noooo!!! Guess I’d better start scouting around. The trouble is that apples don’t do very well on the Highland Rim of Tennessee, you never see big old apple trees dripping fruit here like in The Tennessee Valley. You hardly see apple trees at all here. Once you go up or down from The Rim, you start seeing them. But not on it. My old neighbor said it had to be the rootstocks, said there were a lot of apple trees here when he was young. Back to the notion of Dolgo seedlings…
Some of the charts and articles I’ve read a various university websites cause are entertaining. The reader must understand there is a geographical context to these studies. Cornell and PRI trials probably do no inform southern growers in a meaningful way. I almost dropped a cup of coffee recently while reading an article on the NC State website concerning the best backyard varieties.
The best data I’ve seen comes from this community, and I thank all of those who take the time to share their observations.
Yeah… I recently up-potted 6 M111/G41 interstem grafted trees where the graft union had been buried and the G41 portion had created some small feeder roots. The dividing line between M111 and G41 was very clear and obvious by the presence of those white/fluffy devils versus clean roots with no sign of them. I knocked off much of the soil and soaked the roots in water with some Imidacloprid. Hopefully that soaked into the roots enough to kill them.
Good luck in finding a rootstock which will thrive in your soil. Up in the NE part of Tennessee the weeds can attest to just how fertile it is here! I’m at around 1700’ elevation in the foothills of the Appalachain mountains.
I agree. There is nothing more truthful than someone not far away growing it to give you their experience with it. Many times it conflicts with internet information.
But we are all in love with our own anecdotes just as researchers are in love with their own findings, speaking generally, of course. Regional advice with fruit trees is invaluable but even that is not definitive. Every season brings me amazement as some occurrence in an orchard fails to be explainable to me, actually sometimes in the same orchard with two clones on clonal rootstock a few feet from each other behaving differently, such as two plums, one productive and the other shy. I manage scores of smallish orchards and pest pressure can vary greatly in two separate orchards only a short hike apart, sometimes for explainable reasons, if you are a seasoned expert, and sometimes not.
As far as fruit research, it almost all involves achieving pristine fruit with less than 3% of the crop showing any important defects, especially one that may cause premature rot and on hundreds of acres of monoculture where disease and insect pressure is multiplied exponentially. .Information derived in this context is pretty much all our cooperative extension and most of the fruit growing literature has to work with. Where I live I achieve dependable harvests of mostly sound fruit with a fraction of the chemical intervention required of commercial production. This is the southern NY, CT area where only two sprays have allowed me to very consistently provide many of my customers with sound fruit that stores well- as long as you occasionally throw out a rotten piece- at least this was the case before apple, aka Marsonnina, leaf blotch.invaded my region, suddenly requiring 2 additional summer sprays, and also an Indar app on stonefruit a month before harvest to control brown rot (many varieties, sites and seasons).
My experience with various rootstock is very limited, but I do have experience with growing apple trees in very poor soil in Franklin Cnty NC. I planted 23 varieties of trees on M-111s 30 years ago in the aforementioned poor soil and while M-111s were the best choice for the area, I don’t think any surpassed 12’ in height while some didn’t make it to 10’. At my current location in the Foothills of NC, M-111 trees top out between 15-20’.
I think the size of your M-111’s is the perfect size, IMO. Not having to fight to keep the trees size under control is a plus for me.
I have mostly M-111’s in my orchard. I like them because they are really anchored well in my soil.
The Williams Favorite has turned into a blight bomb for me. It travels fast in this tree. I’ve been nursing one along for 15 years, and I chainsawed it this year.
It’s a the most beautiful apple, but I’m done.
The Summer Banana is much better in terms of disease resistance, but it’s smaller, and the trees tend to be junky/twiggy.
My Winesap requires rigorous fungal protection. It is one of the worst, but fungal issues are not hard to treat.
The Black twig is not quite as bad as the Winesap.
Ark black sees a fair amount of calyx end rot followed by coddling moth, but is very blight resistant.
Thanks for your input. Different climates different experiences I suppose. As an experiment, I planted a bunch CFO apple trees in zone 5a, very close to 4b. I’m looking forward to see how these Appalachia origin trees do up north.
I’m not truly “no spray” in that I will use biofungicide (but I’m lazy about applying it as recommended) and Surround, and I’d be open to using lime sulfur and copper. I admit, I’m pretty cavalier about it and I recognize that may result in dead trees. It’s Survivor out here.
That being said, when I selected trees for the orchard I tried to do a mix of low maintenance to “probably won’t work, but I’ll see” trees. Pristine on G.890 from Cummins went in spring 2023 and this year was the only tree in the area to catch whatever this disease is and be nearly totally defoliated by it. It is neighbor to Cox’s Orange Pippin, Rubinette, Ginger Gold, Kidd’s Orange Red, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, and nearby Red Cinnamon, Clark’s Crabapple, Arkansas Black, a few Limbertwigs, Black Oxford, Liberty, and Hudson’s Golden Gem, none of which (knocking on wood here) show signs of this issue. It came on quite aggressively.
Hope the data point is useful. Below are pictures a month apart, the second is one of the remaining leaves.
@hambone I really hope it isn’t, but I was leaning that direction. I don’t have the yellowing leaves, but I’m doing more reading today and learning that that’s not always a characteristic, that it can just brown. Supposedly also you can see the fungal bodies under a hand lens, so if I get the chance I’ll do that.
People are talking about disease resistance varying from region to region and for me, I am having wildly different experiences on my own 9 acre property. I originally planted about 40 trees in a flat area with a reliable water source, but have lost and replanted so many due to various fungal and bacterial diseases. I was really shaking my head over the idea that Oregon is rumored to be a great fruit growing region. Then I started planting a hill orchard. I have struggled with providing summer irrigation so the trees are growing slowly, but no disease pressure yet, 3 years into this planting. I am going to move some more struggling trees from the lower orchard up the hill and see if I can save them.
Here’s an example, moved in April, which should have been too late for the move, because it was already hot. Trilite peach plum that had maybe 3 wilting leaves and no healthy ones when I moved it
This is, in fact, the only tree of 40 planted up here that doesn’t look great. Grafted 2020, planted in the lower orchard first and moved to the hill orchard spring of 2023. It is still tiny and has produced only one fruit. There are some brown spots on the leaves, when none of the other apples have spots. I lost the tag but it’s an early apple and I by looking at my records and the color of the almost ripe fruit, I think it is a Wynoochee on Bud 9.
For contrast, 2 other lost tag apples on Bud 9 grafted, planted, and moved at the same time. I figured out one was Blairmont (already harvested). Don’t know what the other is. But you can see much more height, better branching. These two need pruning whereas there isn’t much wood at all on the little one. And although they are definitely dry, there’s no sign of disease on either. Uploading: IMG_4654.jpeg…
