You need to look at ornamental crab apples. Most apples flower white. Some start red but fade to white. Red fleshed apples flowers tend to stay red i believe. Overall there is not that much variation in apple to get a tree like the one below. Which is a prunus. But if anyone would know for sure I would ask @JoeReal
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Very ‘cute’ house, Megan. And your garden front yard looks charming!
There is almost always a ‘busy body’ who thinks they need to police the neighborhood. What a pain. My sympathies.
“Plant the sheep very deep !
Extra deep,… they will not be able to reach even low branches .”
Great suggestion, @Hillbillyhort !
Ewe are too funny. 
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Yah, I am not a advocate of having livestock in a orchard , due to soil compaction, plant damage , etc.
Now planting fruit trees in a dedicated pasture is ? …
Another issue ?
Trees need protection from livestock
Do chickens in the orchard keep insect populations down?
Don’t PC drop to the ground, or come out of dormancy from the ground?
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I think chickens / some poultry, maybe beneficial /manageable .
Catching bugs , eating drops .
I have used chicken tractors to good effect. And free range too.
I did watch a free range goose rip the bark off of a newly planted apple tree once.
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I feel like birds and sheep are great additions (with no personal experience) as long as young trees are well protected. Mullberries and persimmons have to be wonderful sources of “free feed” for any farm critters.
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Thanks!
It appears that other people have better behaved chickens than I have been able to find. All the chickens that I have ever had were beings of mass destruction . Probably would be ok , if all you have is trees. If you try to grow vegetables however, they will find every new plant and be sure to destroy it. I lost four freshly potted tomatoes while at work today. Obviously they could not resist hopping up into those 15 gallon pots to scratch for an hour or two. I put those in pots so I could later elevate and enclose them to keep the little destruction queens from pecking everything that turns any color other than dull brown.
good growing and
good fishing , if anyone every get a chance to go
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I watched a guy put some b&b big pear trees in the field with his cattle. The cattle first busted up what they could reach. Then they bull dozed them over for the finisher. Guess at the time he thought it was a good idea. Free feed.
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why i dont free range my birds. they love to throw my woodchip mulch far and wide. they have killed bushes here by digging up the roots looking for worms. nope. they stay in the run now.
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i planted a mulberry and 2 Siberian pea shrubs around the edges of my chic. run. once they fully mature they should supplement their feed.
Tale of 2 root systems
I have 2 apple whips on dwarf rootstock. One has a great root system, the other looks lame in comparison. Should I be concerned about the second wimpier set of roots. Both trees are about 38" tall. Maybe I should cut a foot of the top of the wimpier one?
Thank you for your help!
Was probably just a less rooted rootstock when grafted could cut some off the top of just bid thin (ie knock off some lower buds to let top grow better depending what you want…heading cut = branches vs bud thing and letting top but grow to get whip up high before branching
Thanks! I never thought about removing some lower buds. Great idea.
I had two trees arrive in the mail almost 2 months too early for my zone. I tried to keep them alive but lost quite a bit of the tree. It looks like it’s trying to start over, which is fine with me. Is this part likely tree, though, or rootstock? (the tape is not a graft)
That’s close, but probably the grafted variety. There is another bud pushing next to it that is definitely your intended variety.
This is a very popular topic but if you really want an answer based on full participation, it’s probably worth it to start a new thread.
I think most people are like myself and afraid to give you bad advice. That bud is literally on the graft line but I am leaning towards it not being the rootstock.
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The line looks fairly clear to me and should look more clear to you by looking at the actual tree instead of a photo. The photo indicates to my failing eyesight that you are blessed with a shoot ABOVE the graft union. All you need to know is if it’s above the line it is above the graft union- the separation on a young tree should be obvious, I should think.
What can fool me is when a shoot pushes through the electric tape I use to connect scion to mother wood, which happens rarely. Then you need to wait until you can unpeel the tape.
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