My trees are planted downwind of a lind of cedars. I like the cedars for their landscape value and wind break later in the season. So resistance & spray for me. CAR and Quince rusts are my second biggest pressure right behind curcs.
CAR is such an easy disease to control with a few early sprays. Unless you are living a 100% Organic lifestyle, I would not want to miss out on enjoying so many great tasting varieties.
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yeah i was saying the alternative is a bit ridiculous. Cherry farms do use helicopters to dry their crops to prvent either cracking or disease. so i guess its worth it at some volume LOL
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even if youre organic, there are some organic sprays- though one can argue theyre worse for you than the fungicides out there. (what with the accumulation in the soil of copper etc)
I want my own gd helicopter. Probably not for drying my handful of trees though.
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My Grimes Golden seems to coast through the years just fine
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Years ago I planted four apples on a friend’s farm surrounded by red cedars: Black Limbertwig; Caney Fork Limbertwig; Keener Seedling and Paducah. All doing fine, unsprayed.
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is it an area with wet springs? the rust here is only bad on wet springs. last spring was killer. spring before not bad at all.
I’d say Springs are wet; high humidity tidewater area.
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Some of that could be due to the 2-year life cycle of the fungus. The good year coul’ve just been the year it was getting established on the cedar, then the bad year might have been the year it infected the apple. But you’re also right about the wet springs
well that would imply that all the fungus in the area is on the same year cycle. But i have thousands of wild juniper trees around me.
Wonder why you are so focused on CAR? In Tennessee you have to worry about fruit rots, which are much harder to control with fungicides, than CAR. All it takes for complete control of CAR is two sprays in the spring with myclobutanil (one when the trees leaf out, second one at pedal fall).
It’s important to have a place to continue to catalog rust resistance without spraying. Maybe, someone is planting a tree for a friend, maybe they are planting a tree that their kids might enjoy one day. You can’t always be sure someone will maintain the tree just as you have.
This is a helpful topic.
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I’m at the eastern edge of South Central Kentucky. Eastern red cedars are numerous and cedar apple rust pressure is very high. Here are a few varieties that have thus far shown good cedar rust resistance, with few to no lesions:
Arkansas Black (but bad for fire blight here)
Centennial Crab
Chestnut Crab (also good FB resistance)
Crow Egg (Northern)
Guyandotte Pippin
Hudson’s Golden Gem
Keener Seedling
King David
Kinnaird’s Choice
Liberty
Novamac (good FB resistance; some apparent resistance to codling moth)
Old-Fashioned Limbertwig
Priscilla
Victoria Limbertwig
Virginia Greening
Williams’ Pride
Green River gets a few rust spots—but much fewer and smaller than one finds on susceptible varieties such as Golden Delicious, and probably not enough to significantly impact tree health. I think it can probably be grown organically here, and may be very CAR-resistant in some areas. It might also be FB resistant, as I had a potted specimen that was right against another potted apple that was killed by blight, but the Green River was untouched by it.
Macintosh/Fameuse family apples seem to show good resistance. In addition to Novamac, we have two unknowns which have Mac-ish characteristics—one of which may be Paula Red. They never have a spot of cedar rust and don’t seem bothered by blight.
No list of resistant varieties works for every location, but it’s always helpful to have data from other growers.
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This is a good resource as well
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