North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Hélène Dessureault <interverbis@videotron.ca>]

Good luck! YES, It is always wonderful when a new tree start being 
productive... with more problems to deal with. Thinning out is a priviledge 
....

Hélène, zone 4
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ginda Fisher" <list@ginda.us>
To: "NAFEX Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 3:18 PM
Subject: [NAFEX] bagging apples


> My Jonathan tree planted in 2000 and the grafts on my crab (done in
> 2001) finally set fruit this year.   I have no idea why it took so
> long, but my guess is some combination of lack of direct sunlight and
> winter moths, which eat the buds.  I had very poor fruit set as a %
> of bloom, probably some combination of the effect of winter moths,
> which damage the fruiting parts well before the buds open, and the
> sprays for winter moths, which probably took out some of my
> pollinators.*
>
> So today I went out and thinned/bagged the fruitlets.   Last year I
> got a few blooms, and bagged 8 apples after they reached "marble
> size".  That was clearly too late, as most had already been attacked
> by something, probably curlicue.  This year I started bagging as soon
> as I could, promptly ran out of baggies, and bought more last night.
>
> I removed all the obviously damaged/weak fruitlets, and in the rare
> cases where a flower cluster had set more than 2-3 healthy-looking
> fruits, I thinned to 2 or 3.  Having waited so long for fruit, I am
> certain that I'd prefer more apples to larger apples, and I have no
> great faith that the trees will set fruit next year no matter what I
> do this year.  :-)  So I thinned less, not more.  I bagged about 100
> fruits, mostly Jonathan and Ashmeads Kernal, with a few Ribston and
> Tydeman's Late Orange.
>
> Wish me luck.
>
> Ginda
> Eastern MA, zone 6
>
> *  This was the subject of a previous rant.  I finally contacted the
> tree company, which I'd hired to spray my oaks. They assured me that
> they hadn't sprayed anything that was actually in bloom, and that
> they'd come on a day with no wind, so there should be very little
> drift.  The Spinosad they use has low residual toxicity to
> pollenators, so they shouldn't have done much damage to the
> population.  In fact, the following weekend I had a huge amount of
> bee activity on the blueberries, so perhaps they told the truth.
>
>
>
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