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["Kieran and/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

 David, 

    Thank you.  I have Winesap and the related Mammoth Blacktwig (which isn't nearly as good but comes in very late and keeps pretty well) because of their CAR resistance.  If I remember correctly scab is favored by cooler temps than we have in our Tennessee summers.  That means scab will grow fine early and late in the season, but not in the middle.  Mind you, that may be as long as the entire season further north, so it may be a bigger problem than I think it is.  They had a terrible year in western WA this year for anything fruit or gardenwise.  It was a cold wet spring and summer just didn't arrive.  My son had a hive of bees starve to death in June because there were still no flowers for them.  He has all these apple trees in his front yard that make apples without his apparently lifting a finger.  Well, that's not true, he has those sticky red balls for apple maggot, but the irritating thing is that they grow while my trees sit around doing nothing for years on end.  So it was a big deal for me to go out and just look at what he had.  I saw that he'd not gotten out and thinnned so I yanked little stunted apples out of 2 trees that weren't ripe yet, Fuji and Grany Smith.  The Granny Smiths were just disgusting with scab, so I pulled the worst of them as well as the little ones.  He says that the climate is all wrong west of the Cascades for fruit and that scab is the big problem.  He said it was the ideal year to look at old trees to evaluate for scab.  Some had it bad, most did not.  One place we went to had the biggest butternut tree known, planted around 1850.  The guy, George W. Bush, was one of the original 9 families to settle the area and he must have brought a pound of apple seeds with him.  Dave said he planted about 160 acres in apple trees, had the apple business wrapped up there for generations.  The story is that the very best of the big orchard were grafted in the backyard of the house, and he collected budwood from all 6 trees.  One had already finished, one was yellow and unbelievably sour, one was pretty good, and the others weren't quite ripe.  The original orchard is now a small airport.  Anyway, what I was coming around to is that I have a friend with a Granny Smith tree in his no-spray home orchard, and he says they have to pick the apples early because they get these black spots that rot if they don't go ahead and pick and process them.  Sounds like scab to me now that I know GS is prone to it.  Also now I can say I know for sure what scab looks like on apples, because there just aren't all that many apples in our area.  Pears are a whole lot more successful.  Over in the Tennessee Valley I knew where all the yards were with producing apple trees, but here there are just hardly any successful old trees.  And maybe because the trees don't do well they get cut down and never reach the age where they are going to be really productive.  I say that because I just remembered that there is a neighborhood where a small orchard was planted by a TN Tech professor in the 40's, and those trees did make crops most years.   

    I have tried several times to graft a Grimes Golden.  I know of an old orchard north of Cookeville where I picked a wonderful apple that must be Grimes, been there twice and got scions, but no takes.  I'll have to look into Goldrush.  And I'm disappointed to hear someone didn't like Enterprise, which sounded good to me.  But he was in the PNW, and maybe it likes heat?    Donna