3 golden delicious
1 pink lady
1 honey crisp
2 esopus spItzenburg
2 kingston black
2 king David
1 baldwin
1 famuse
1 granny smith
Would you do any special placement besides the Granny Smith and Golden Delicious which are mainly pollinators for others. It might be good to keep like trees together where I have pairs and keep the pink lady and honey crisp together. It probably won’t matter much because pollinators are gonna do what they do anyways. As.long as I place pollinating partners close by.
I will place trunk guards and stand up a 4 foot high, 4 foot diameter fence around each tree. I have 225 foot for this row so was thinking of not crowding them and planing on 16 foot spacing.
It’s going to be plant once and be done, I would appreciate any responses of knowledge…
Your 4’ diameter fences will fill up fast. I went 6’ squares 6’ high fence, and the semi dwarf trees became cramped, so I need to expand the fences after 8 or 9 years (or sooner). I find it helpful to use extra fencing and overlap when planting it to make it easier when I need to expand the enclosures. Maybe I am doing overkill, but better safe than sorry. You also need room to walk around the tree for thinning, bagging, picking, etc.
Your deer. Animal behavior is unpredictable and in years of using fence circles I only had a problem with deer browsing by pushing in fencing one time on one site here in S NY. I was told that the previous owner of the property used to feed deer corn like they were her pets. Even in this case they only did it to certain varieties of apples- particularly Mutsu.
Believe me, the lack of this pressure is not a result of low deer population, some of the towns in my region have very restrictive rules on hunting and the land is overpopulated with these mammalian brush hogs.
You can make a circle with a 10’ length of 5’ tall fencing and hold it up with a single stake, closing the ring with two or three strands of the fence and get complete protection from dear here almost all the time, even on sites where there are bucks that get up on their hind legs to browse high up in established apple trees. The deer browse the branches that come outside the fencing which aids the process of training trees above the browse line. Such a ring is easy to open to weed and prune.
Less is more and you need to adapt to your local conditions. Sometimes that even involves some risk to find out what you can get away with. For example, most landscapers around here use 4 stakes to make a square as a matter of course when fencing trees against deer because tradesmen often are very adverse to risk. They also stake newly installed trees with 3 wires and hose rings and three stakes in the ground. I use a single stake taped to a single branch when installing trees that need anchorage. I’ve been doing it for years and it always provides adequate support the first year of establishment, but although I have a very good reputation in the area I work, I’ve yet to see anyone duplicate my obviously quicker and cheaper method.
Im not big into apples… but as far as i can tell owning a honey crisp and granny smith means that you will probably have to be a guy who needs to know what to spray and when. Most every pic i see on social medias is problematic. I wish u luck.
As far as deer… i have 4 foot perimeter fences and 2 dogs…with exits and entries for the dogs… They patrol the fences and nothing gets in or out without their pursuit.
I anticipated squirrel damage later on so i put feeders in all of my orchards… the dogs now hate them and chase them out… they have killed about 5 squirrels this year.
No deer damage at all in 2 years. Likely no squirrel damage in the future as long as the dogs stay healthy.
Without dogs i would probably need 8 foot fences or have to make those tree prisons that alot of folks make. I just didnt want that look myself but i do understand the need.
For deer here’s what I’ve done and it seems to work. Deer do browse lower branch tips that find their way through the fence. I have not had any browsing of growth that proceeds over top of the 4 foot fence. The fence is 13 foot long I measure out 2 foot on either side of the truck and drive 6 foot t-posts to secure the fence
Honeycrisp.
It’s a wonderful apple isn’t it?
It has huge issues with bitter pit.
The short and easy answer to preventing bitter pit in Honeycrisp is to use it on B-9 rootstock.
Yes B-9 is completely dwarfing. It’s also the only rootstock I’ve heard this far that has a pretty good batting average with bitter pit.
Longer answer.
With Honeycrisp there’s a school of thought that the bitter pit caused by the veins in the tree closing as the fruit approaches maturity cutting off calcium absorption.
B-9 doesn’t seem to have that effect.
There’s a second school of thought advanced by my friend who’s a horticulturist at Saunders Bros.:
Bitter pit starts during cell division so sometime between April and June.
B-9 still holds up really in yielding astonishingly low amounts of bitter pit.
Entire encyclopedias worth of research and data have been written about Honeycrisp.
And I like pretending that I’m a grower so I go to conventions that have hours of lectures on Honeycrisp.
Fun stuff
Dwarfing rootstocks are not an option here, there are simply too many deer. There is a hunt club 240 acres to the south. I regularly see deer crossing my cattle pasture.
Last year I had a pretty colored red doe that hung around most all summer. She would snort at me to get my attention. It was entertaining at first, but became a nuisance pretty quickly.
BTW I noticed yesterday, bucks are in velvet already, seems a little early (first of July) but I seen several in velvet yesterday. This means rubbing season will be here before I know it.
Deer start growing their antlers in March and April. By July, we start seeing very noticible racks on these bucks, but they already have about 90 days growth on them. Even in the most northern range of whitetails, their antlers are in full growth mode by May. Typically September 1 is when bucks will shed their velvet and start rubbing saplings. Usually the real damage to trees starts around October as bucks establish their breeding patterns and territories, which could change each year, but not always.
To the OP, i like the varieties that you have in that group, i have all the same here. I havent seen any issues with pollination of the triploids, and i dont think you will either. There is enough variety in that mix to get good crossing.
September 1st is pretty much when my issues with buck rubs would start.
And the season would go on…into October…then November…then I just broke down and installed a fence because I couldn’t take it anymore.
