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  • From: Hélène Dessureault <interverbis@videotron.ca>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] bagging apples
  • Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:29:07 -0400

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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  • Re: [NAFEX] bagging apples, Hélène Dessureault, 06/01/2008

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