I have a few apple seedlings that I am planning on grafting. I guess they take about 7 to 10 years to produce. When I graft a scion to them will that cut down on the time it takes them to produce or do I have to use a rootstock grown for that purpose. I know that some grafted apple trees only take about 4 years to produce.
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Some varieties will speed up the fruiting, some won’t. Because they are seedlings they’ll probably still take a while
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Thank You
I have a lot less apples and pears this year compared to last year. We didn’t have any late frosts in ne Ohio. Is that what others are seeing and attributable to the cool wet spring?
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we have had the same conditions here but im seeing one of the best fruit sets ive seen in awhile. many of my trees are fruiting for the 1st time but my fruit bushes are also loaded. i have alot of bumbles here which fly in much lower temps than most other native bees. very rare to see a honey bee this far north. maybe you have a lack of cold weather pollinators there? supposed to be 37 tonight.
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I’m in southern Oregon and at first I was worried about pollination - bees just didn’t seem to be anywhere. But they showed up a week or two late and everything fruited after all. I also thought all the barn swallows had left us, but they showed up late, too.
I’ve had a terrible couple years for Asian plums, peaches, and hybrids like plum cots. A lot of late rain last year, and disease set in. I should have pruned aggressively, but I didn’t. This year we had a massive flood before most of the trees were blooming, but not a lot of rain afterwards so the ground has been dry. The apples and pears (except Potomac) ended up setting a LOT of fruit, meaning extra thinning for me and more snacks for this guy:
He just shakes his head side to side when he wants a snack all to himself, and no one wants to be hit with those horns, so it usually works.
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We had a cool wet spring in BC and great fruit set this year. My best guess is that the factors were:
- Good precip last year, i.e. wasn’t a drought year, and the trees were pretty healthy
- We didn’t have any late frosts
- There was a break in the rain in late April and early May right around the time things were flowering
Did you have some heavy rain around flowering time?
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Same here Alan. I had pretty good bloom this spring, many trees with first bloom and others with their first heavy bloom. Fruit set was below average. We had cool temps and rain through bloom and our neighbor closed his honey bee business. I do have some thinning to do though.
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He is s handsome boy. Do you keep them as pets or for meat?
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Alan,
I’m from north central Ohio. Apples are doing ok, but on 16 peach trees I got no blooms. They had dormant flower buds in February, and when I looked at them early on, they looked like they were all dead. So I think they got hurt in the early winter low temps. They held their leaves long into December, so maybe they grew late into the fall. Trees are fine, just no blooms.
Pears are as how they normally are… no fruit. Some are 12 years old.
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Is there a resource that shows when different pear varieties are ready to harvest?
They are half of my landscaping crew, I have 9 acres, about 5 of it hilly, and prone to being smothered in scotch broom, poison oak, and Armenian/ Himalayan blackberries. These little goats aren’t the best eaters, unlike the big goats I had before, but they aren’t causing much erosion, either. Did you know goats like to flop and slide down a hill like they are sledding? Or roll and scratch like chickens dust bathing? I can move them into a new hill pasture periodically to prevent them from making new gullies.
Here’s another member of the landscaping crew, working hard at rodent removal when he’s not trying to make me stop working,
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Same exact situation here. No peach or nectarine flowers for the most part. Zone 5 NY we hit -11 in late january.
Decent apple set as most of my stuff is blooming for the first or second time. Rain took a hit on pollen viability though I’d wager
Never even had a pear flower on me yet, reconsidering them altogether.
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They’re growing in the sun and not still tiny one or two year old looking stunted trees after 12 years? There’s pears that are fine down to like Zone 2, so you might just need to grow more cold hardy varieties?
So this apple tree came labeled from the big box store. Labeled “Granny Smith”. Today I saw the only cluster of apples on the tree have red developing haha.
Whats a good starting place for the basics of IDing unknown apples? Thanks
Which red apples do they sell? Red Delicious, Gala, Honeycrisp, etc? It’s probably something else they carry rather than totally random I would think.
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New question.
By the nature of where the town was built, our yards look bad because the soil is low quality mostly sand. Around my trees I am augmenting the soil by replacing with topsoil.
I have some patches where the soil is pure sand and grass doesn’t grow. No trees are going there. I read that covering with 1 inch of manure per year for 5-10 years will decay into the sand and convert it to useable topsoil. For these patches, I want to start testing the process since I could expand how much of the yard I try to improve.
Question: After 10 years of top layering 1 inch of manure will the elevation (above sea level) of these sand patches increase so that they become like uneven mounds standing inches above the rest of the yard? Should I remove some inches off the top before I start the process?
The simple answer to your problem is no, you wont raise your elevation.
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the organic matter will just fill in between the gaps in the sand. i would also put a good amount of mulch on top of that around your trees as well. that will also break down and enrich your soil over time. as long as you just lay it on the surface it wont affect the amount of N further down.
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Larisa, what a helpful and beautiful landscapiny crew you have. I grew up in city and never had farm animals . I pet a goat, maybe other animals, in a pet farm. I had a pet cat. I didn’t know goats are so much fun to keep. Thanks for sharing the joyful personality of your goats.
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