No Spray Apple List

General Fruit Growing
#41

@hambone… but if you have a couple of large red cedars about 30 ft away… your Gold Rush will suffer something awful or at least mine has. I would remove them (the cedars), but I actually dug them up from the edge of my woods (near 20 years ago) and planted one on each side of a telephone pole (to hide it some). The red cedars have done a excellent job of that (hiding a telephone pole).

But you definitely do not want to plant a Gold Rush that near a couple red cedars.
Not sure if rain plays a part in CAR, but the two years my GR have been planted near these cedars have been extra rainy years too.

I have other red cedars in the edge of my fields and roadway… more like 40-50 yards away, but I expect it is the two large ones near by that is causing it so much harm.

Ok… after work now… I ran out and got a couple pics of my GR leaves and fruit.

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By the way those started as small red rusty looking spots… and grew into this.

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I think that is sooty blotch there… Right ?

Not what I was hoping for in a disease resistent apple tree.

TNHunter

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#42

One older variety that consistently seems to do pretty well for me in terms of CAR is Westfield Seek No Further. Every year it seems to do noticeably better for that than the neighboring trees. (All my trees are unsprayed at this point. I will probably start spraying some dormant oil because my pears have had trouble with blister mites, and I may start doing a very minimal spray for scab and CAR on my apples, though I feel reasonably confident that most of them could get by without it.)

I’m not as experienced as many people here, but my observations suggest that also be very site-specific. I have one row of trees on the south side of my house and one row on the north. The apples on the south side consistently show more CAR. I suspect that there must be a carrier for CAR down the street in that direction, and so the apples on that side are exposed to a higher level of spores, while the apples in the lee of the house get hit by considerably less.

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#43

@PaulinKansas6b — you mentioned NovaMac.

And I am especially interested in that one… well because it is a Mac Apple grafted to a root stock that is scab resistant.

My Early Mcintosh is supposed to be a cross of Mcintosh and Yellow Transparent.
It has never had any scab…

It also survived (living within 30ft of 6 different varieties of pears and 3 different varieties of apples) that died of fire blight… so I assume it has to be quite fire blight resistant.

It has never had anything like sooty blotch, always very clean apples, but they ripen very early, harvested the last on on July 22.

That is making me think that McIntosh may just be my bullet proof tree… and hopefully NovaMac would work for me too (but be a later bearing tree, just what I need).

Do you have any actual experience growing NovaMac ? I would love to hear about it if you do (or anyone else).

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I did find a pic online labeled as Organic NovaMac Apples… which may not mean no spray, but if true would mean only organic sprays.
They look pretty good to me. Just a pic online though.

Per the Perdue article NovaMac is rated Very Resistant to Scab, CAR, Fire Blight and Powdery Mildew.

TNHunter

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#44

Thanks, now I don’t need to run out and take pictures of the two that I have. They look the same. It’s sad really. I was really hoping that they would do well. I don’t have ceders planted, but my neighbor does. I need to move further out in the country, lol. :slight_smile:

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#45

@FarmGirl-Z6A How close are your neighbor’s cedars to your Goldrush trees? Just curious what’s a safe distance.

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#46

Sooty Blotch seems harmless to me- doesn’t hurt the apple that I can see, except appearance. I’ve eaten many years of sooty blotch apples.

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#47

Good to know @hambone… I was hoping to try a GR apple this fall… if they don’t rot and fall off first :slight_smile:

FarmGirl… I feel your pain.

All… I took that Purdue list that @mroot so kindly provided a link to and searched it, filtered it eliminating all varieties that were shown with any degree of susceptibility to the big 4 (scab, fb, car, powdery mildew) and below are the ones that are left.

These all show some degree of Resistance to the big 4.

For example… Pristine is mentioned above by a few… but per Perdue it is Susceptible to CAR so it was eliminated from this list. The stats for a few edible crabs are at the end.

This list is where I noticed that NovaMac is the only one listed as VR to all 4.

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One more note… where I live here in southern middle TN, it is very common for our springs to warm up in late March early April and then we get a hard frost… when that happens… trees that bloom early… bloom and get frosted, or even bloom set fruit and get frosted hard enough to loose fruit.

I am afraid to try some of the varieties in this list that are known to be very disease free, simply because they bloom early. Williams Pride is one I have considered, but eliminated because of the early bloom. If your springs are like mine… you may need to consider bloom/pollination time too.

TNHunter

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#48

I am auditioning Sundance- very promising reports on it from a Georgia member. Take a look at Keepsake- it has won a spot here but my track record with it is short. Fabulous taste, texture.

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#49

Yeah bloom time has been a concern of mine too!
I have not found Novamac yet but it is one i want. My planting is still young, 1 to 4 years old. But I am trying to choose what I try to establish in an informed way.
Here are some that are mid to later bloom that i hope to test, that according to what I have read have shown resistance, I have half of these:
Enterprise, Liberty, Freedom, ArkBlack, BlkLimbertwig, Wolf River, Sweet16, Keepsake, Sundance, Priscilla, Winecrisp, Goldrush, Horse, Smokehouse, Aunt Rachel, PRI Co-op 26, 37, 40, Juliet, Novamac, Galarina, Black Oxford, Yates, Caney Ft Limbertwig, Blacktwig, Keener, Paducah, Hooples Antique Gold, Hunge, Blenheim Orange.

If I was to shorten this list, here is what sounds the most promising from my reading, for resistance, which I especially want:
Enterprise, Freedom, Blk Limbertwig, Keepsake, Sundance, Winecrisp, Horse, PRI Co-op 26, 37, 40, Juliet, Novamac, Galarina, Yates, Hunge, Blenheim Orange.
And quite a few of those were developed by the PRI program with focus on disease resistance.
Some other good ones like Williams Pride really sound good except the bloom time. The above numbered PRI types and Juliet, Enterprise, Freedom, Novamac, Hunge & Sundance are my top picks I would say!

For latest bloom, Court Pendu Plat and Bedan sound like the best late bloomers as far as also being moderately resistant to the common diseases.

After disease resistance, late bloom and keeper ability both mean a lot to me. Fresh eating taste to my preference is less of a concern since there are so many ways to use apples such as cooking, pie, dried, juice, cider and vinegar, I imagine we can do something even with a poor apple as long as we actually get a harvest. :slight_smile:

So I have used multiple sources to gain these thoughts, and I hope to get to test most or all of them in my climate.

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#50

Well, his back yard backs into my back yard. He has about 3 acres and we have 5. The trees in question are about 200 feet apart.

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#51

@TNHunter

Freedom has been wormy around here if that’s a concern. Very productive, but taste? Um, not sure if that rates very high…although maybe I will change my mind this year. I might put it in the liberty category of at least better than red delicious. Blenheim didn’t seem to like the climate or something. Uniformly dead everywhere the year after grafting after strong growth. Wimpy British apple I guess.

Williams pride made apples this year after temps hitting 18F… but maybe I just got lucky. If you can control the air temps perfectly, maybe you can weather thin enough blooms so that it doesn’t go biennial :slight_smile: But, I didn’t think it was the best apple in the world anyway. Pristine is much better for an early apple (and keeps longer). Or even Sansa, not that it is necessarily disease resistant.

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#52

Good feedback! Your experiences @snowflake will also influence me since our climates are similar. I hope some of these prove decent for us!

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#53

@snowflake — this fall winter I am having some dozer work done on my new home location. Plan to build new home… and will be starting new orchard, food forest, fruit tree guilds, etc.

I am going to have my dozer guy take out every red cedar any where near my new orchard location… I might have better luck with varieties like pristine and gold rush there.

TNHunter

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#54

Last night I searched for YouTube vids on novamac but found little…

Then decided to watch a couple vids from Stefan at miracle farms… permaculture orchard… the one above on how to collect and store scionwood.

He said that during harvest season they make notes on the best most productive most vigorous varieties… and they collect scionwood from those to graft over varieties that are not doing so well.

The first bundle/package of scionwood he showed was NovaMac.

I believe his orchard is in Canada…

After watching that one… I watched another where he shows grafting “our best apples” on to rootstock using a grafting tool.

NovaMac scionwood was being grafted there too.

TNHunter

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#55

I have a 2yr old Akane just down a bit from my gold rush. It has very mild symptoms of CAR… obviously not really going to be a problem for it. It did not bloom this spring… but hopefully will next. It has grown nicely and looks happy and healthy here.

I know some above have had some issues with Akane… but evidently it works well for some. It did make the perdue’s list showing resistance to the big 4.

This guy from burnt ridge nursery has a nice vid on it… and he brags on it… nice crop every year. Hope it works for me.

TNHunter

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#56

Nutrition makes all the difference!!!

After finding out I was interested in fruit trees, a woman I knew online in VA told me this story: She and her husband bought a house in a neighborhood and planted 3 apple trees in the front yard. They grew well and began cropping after a few years. They cropped heavily and every apple was plump and unblemished. The neighbors wanted to know their secret. They didn’t have one. They didn’t spray or fertilize. So what kind of apples? Same common kinds as all the gnarled pitiful fruit on the local trees. So where’d they get the trees? The neighbors tried to duplicate their success, to no avail. And then, after 15 years of perfect crops, they discovered they had a leak in their sewer line… fixed it, and the crops went downhill from there.

And no, I am incapable of coming even close to duplicating this experiment where I am, and anyway, all the sprays in the world wouldn’t keep the squirrels from eating any apples my trees might produce.

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#57

Chlorine is deadly poisonous. A splash of it in your drinking water is government approved.

So? A couple squished little guys in cider?

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#58

No concern about health effects just taste effects on the cider if say half the apples had worms.

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#59

It’s not just apple cider, it’s apple mezcal…

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#60

@TNHunter

Sooty blotch and Flyspeck

Both are surface only. When harvested, I run this under cool water and use a soft kitchen sponge to wipe these off.

Mike

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