Thank you everyone. It seems like the two options that lay before me are to bring it back to a foot or replace it outright.
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Id keep it and graft it, but I have plenty of space.
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I wish I had more space. If I did I’d probably lean to the cut back more. The spot where it’s growing is the worst of them. The sun doesn’t hit until noon due to trees on the neighbors side of the fence.
Apples in my opinion and experience have very low vigor in comparison with peaches or pears in general. It is truly all about the rootstocks and scions. This is an old story for me. The problems your having are the reason i use mm111 rootstock. Few combinations work well for me. Fameusse , 39th parallel, seedlings , haralson, prarie spy, honeycrisp apples all stay alive for me here. Most apples simply die in my soil. The problem your having is a textbook problem from my perspective though few say it plainly. Do you use a fungicide on your apples? My suspicion is you didn’t and you should. This part of the photo makes me suspect a fungal disease eg. Blackrot is at work here. It is not fireblight thankfully. I’m not sure if it is to late but if you spray with immunox or captan you will know quickly. My guess is that blackness will turn greenish colored after a few sprays. Frequently dont spray myself which gives me a unique perspective on reading when a tree develops something like a fungal illness. Why spray if you have no disease? Many spray for prevention of diseases. I would spray with copper later this fall just after leaf drop. Then prune over the winter many of the low branches trying again to invigorate it. Graft it over if you want at the same time. I suggest against trimming it down to one foot. It will kill the tree most likely if you do. If you replace it i wouldnt use a pome like an apple or pear i would use a stone fruit like a sour cherry.
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I find it funny how we backyard orchard people with limited space stress out over a single tree. I have a friend that while technically a backyard orchard as well, his backyard is a tad larger with probably close to a hundred trees. He also has been going it for a few decades now.
A while back he wanted to work on plums so down came 10 or so fully grown producing apple trees. Later he wanted to work on black currants so an area with 15 or so very large haskap bushes came down to make space for those.
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I wish. I have 15 fruit trees. 10 apples. Of that two are producing plus this one that should be.
I’m betting I’ll have a first fruiting on two more trees next year.
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How are your other 10 apples doing? What rootstock are they?
Any voles or root damaging critters around? Is the tree wobbly?
I did not notice the name sign with your tree previous to this and thought these are souvenirs of departed/axed varieties from your yard!
@sockworth The others are doing well enough. One is in a non-irrigated area and was never in the best shape in the first place so I’ll discount that. The rest are still young but are putting on good growth and seem healthy overall. No wobble or signs of root damaging animals. There could be grubs doing some harm but its hard to say if they are bothering the roots of the trees or the turf around them.
Sadly I cant speak to the rootstock on the two + 1 oldest that are bearing since I bought them as established trees. All three are semi dwarfing but that’s as far as I can get.
@PharmerDrewee yeah I thought about that. The originals were made from cedar that I removed from my yard so it would survive the elements. If I do pull this tree down I’ll slice a disk out of it to make a “gravestone”. I’ve thought of keeping old tags on my office wall as a testament to what I’ve tried and failed on. Failing is part of growth even if it hurts. Something that I’m forever trying to teach my daughters.
Lime in early winter to neutralize my super acidic soil, compost top dress, calcium nitrate to bring up my cal and nitrogen in early spring, then just compost tea.
Thanks for your reply. I live on a sand dune, which has been stable since prehistory and planted to sod for 140 years. … not much fertility there. I have applied gypsum a couple of times in the last 10 years as a source of Ca. The tree in the above photo is a Wolf River on B9 that yielded two crops before declining. I’ve since cut out the central leader that was dying. The picture is from June 2020. I didn’t think it would leaf out that year because the flowers were so tiny, but it did, and it continues to hang on. County Agent says any damage may have had to do with a Polar Vortex somewhere along the line.
What you don’t see is two trees behind me that have died (Sweet 16 and Golden Russet both on B9) after cropping successfully. All were planted in the same year. Two other trees (Honeycrisp on B9 and Fireside on M26) planted that year continue to thrive as do 15 trees planted later. The first five were put in along the lot line including the Wolf River, but it shares only one quadrant of its roots with the neighboring lot. The two trees that died shared half. It is merely possible that the neighbor has used an herbicide to kill woody plants, which caused a growth habit obvious in the Wolf River (and in the Golden Russet that died) that seems very similar to that of your tree.
That does look similar to the specter that I have in the ground now. My soil is mostly sand too so that may be a factor. This spring when it flowered it was sporadic and it flowered again after I cut out a larger limb in the attempt to graft it over. What I read indicated that it sometimes happens when you cut off a large limb. Those blooms charred from the tip and died.
My neighbor doesnt put anything down on that portion of his lot. He leaves it as a wildlife area, complete with crabapples.
I’ll have to see what rootstocks I can identify in what I have growing now. The tree that is showing the most vigor has to be my Chestnut Crab but I don’t know the rootstock that it is sitting on. Hard to say how much of that vigor is tied to the rootstock and how much is the cultivar itself. Logic says that the vigor of any cultivar would be limited by the max vigor of the root that its on though.
@CRhode That sucks to hear of the decline after successful cropping.
@busch83 I’m in same boat as you but with 2 plum trees (from big box stores). Also got low vigor pear shipped with mangled roots… In all cases, for me know there is or suspect root issues. I’ll probably replace them all with wild callery pear seedlings (free around here) and graft over them.
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I’d bring it low, then graft a different variety, under the guess that this variety is susceptible to some aspect of this location, be it scab, rust, some virus, etc.
I was going to say bring it low and also get a replacement for a nearby location. But it sounds like things are pretty full and there isn’t much sense in close spacing if there is already a lot of shade.
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I’m going to graft a franklin crab onto g969 as a standby. Whatever goes in needs to handle sandy soil, be free standing, and resist wooly apple aphids. Granny probably wasn’t the best choice but its a bit late to worry about that now.
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Busch83:
I too agree with Fruitnut that it sure looks some sort of root issue. Was the tree originally planted bare-root or from a container grown tree? Just wondering if it was container grown and perhaps rootbound when it was planted? Just a possibility on what the issue is.
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I’m extremely happy with my Franklin crab. If you want it for cider blends I’m sure you’ll be happy as well. If you want to eat them, well good luck with that 
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@Spartan no it was a nursery plant so it was established in a pot first. It didn’t seem to be at least. But since I didn’t blast the dirt off I guess it could have had the seeds of being rootbound in there when i put it in the ground. If I pull it I will spray the ball off and let everyone know.
@don1357 Well I’m glad to hear that you’re happy with the tree. How has it been with pest and disease for you? Is it vigorous? The tannin in it is that harsh huh? I do like a tart apple and dry wine so maybe it will work as a fresh eating apple for me anyhow.
I’d like to do some cider but the main consideration is its pest/disease resistance. Where the G Smith is standing now doesn’t get light until noonish which apparently can predispose a tree to diseases since they don’t dry off quickly as the temperature rise. (I’m not sure if this applies here but I could see it being a factor) Last year I had to cut a good deal of FB out of the tree and I think there is a new strike on one of the upper limbs that needs attention now.
Franklin seems to be one of the more resilient cultivars, other suggestions are welcome, so my thought is that I can put that down as the base/scaffold. Then I will have apples for cider at the very least and I can graft in some other semi resilient varieties down the line. And since Franklin is listed as VR to FB I won’t worry as much about a future hit making me cut out grafts.
Another reason to pull this poor old G. Smith, shoot blight. Or I should say what looks like shoot blight to me. It is constantly suffering from hits here and there. The question is, is it the poor health of the tree leading to shoot blight or is the blight one of the underlying conditions sapping the life from this tree.
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