Down the road my parents have an older apple tree, I’m guessing 30+ years old that has lost bark (an opening at least 6" wide exposing the trunk) on the east side and has a huge black line progressing up the trunk where the bark came off (I’ll try to get pictures tomorrow, I didn’t have my phone). I did not notice it last year, but it didn’t fruit so I didn’t go back that way much. It seems to be biennial bearing, but I have no idea what variety it might be. The west side of the tree seems to be budding fine (we are way behind up North here, not much is leafing out yet), but the side that the “line” is progressing up is looking pretty dead. The line is black like fire blight, but I don’t believe fire blight acts like this on an older tree? It has been completely unmaintained for at least 20 years. Any ideas on what it might be? I looked around a bit in my apple/orchard books but saw nothing like it.
I am putting in an orchard, and it is about 1/4 mile away from my trees so I want to take care of it if something can be done for it (or remove it!). There are several other massive apple trees a few hundred feet away that are seemingly healthy and not affected (but are also probably 100 years old). I offered a few new trees to replace the older and declining ones, since I had so many extras from learning to graft this spring… hoping they take me up on that. I’d like to see the trees they have replaced. They are too old to renovate IMHO.
No, it’s a loner volunteer tree in a North-South oriented overgrown fencerow in the field, we brush hog a path by the east side a couple times a year. It’s been kept fairly clean around it. Closest trees are 200’+ away. It had the best apples out of all the trees they had, figures it had to be this one that declined. I’ll run over later and get a picture.
Black rot = fungus Botryosphaeria obtuse. Not unusual for rotting apple wood, but can infect fruit as well. May be a good tree to eliminate. Are those suckers at the base of the tree? May be able to graft to them.
It looks like typical dieback to me. At my location, I see this often with trees that losing the competition with larger, faster growing trees like maple and ash. In this case, it is hard to say what caused it. It will require more investigation. Is it just one branch that is declining? What does the trunk near the ground look like?
Yes there appears to be one sucker you can’t see on the back with a 1" diameter clean sucker with branches in the back, those little guys are all suckers also. If we cut the main trunk out and left the one large sucker, would the sucker likely be or get infected also? I looked up black rot, but wasn’t sure if it would be in the soil or not.
@AJfromElmiraNY just one side of the tree seems to be declining (the front from the view of the picture). The back side where the suckers are seems to be growing. I’ll have to double check the ground, it’s pretty overgrown over there. The black line does go to the ground as far as I could tell without totally peeling the thing back.
Sounds like it just needs to come out, just thinking maybe we could retain the large sucker…
