Apple pruning.

I realize this thread is about pruning, but wanted to add a bit :
When a customer wants a tree pruned for fruit, I also let them know that it requires spraying on a regular schedule & vigilance to keep up with insects & diseases, particularly apple trees. Harvesting your own fruit seems like a great idea, but it can be a lot of work.
P.S. I am brutal with apple trees !
 
You about have to spray them to get good apples .The only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple is to find half a worm .
 
If a worm has no desire to eat it why should I? We make toxic food like twinkies that even bacteria aren't interested in. I am OK with dormant oil but I am not into pesticides. We eat almost entirely organic food.
 
no kidding...
i gues wee lucky
our biggest apple problems are blight,scab, moth and maggott
only a ahndful of diseased trees a year.
more blight this year i sterilize at each jobsite now
 
My ex was a natural food freak plus a know it all .

Imagine this ,preach and rant a rave about a little bug spray but then drink 10 16 oz Pepsi's a day and smoke a pack and half of cigarettes .

Most organic gardeners I know are not growing food stuffs .:/:
 
I used to pick a lot of unsprayed apples to make cider. I would have 100 gallons pressed at a time. Some orchards were pretty clean. I think it depended on the variety and the location. IPM will let you spray only when it is necessary. Not a blanket spray schedule.
 
after my class this friday i should be able poison lots of apples:lol: go find darins certified crops and de-certify them:/:
 
Cobleskill said:
I used to pick a lot of unsprayed apples to make cider. I would have 100 gallons pressed at a time. Some orchards were pretty clean. I think it depended on the variety and the location. IPM will let you spray only when it is necessary. Not a blanket spray schedule.
Click to expand...

When I grew apples I would keep a protective layer of pesticide on the apple at all times once the weather was warm enough for the moths to start flying. The pesticide (usually lorsban but sometimes guthion) was supposed to last 28 days so we just sprayed every 25 days. If you had one little gap in that you would have problems. In September the days would start getting shorter and the moths would quit flying, and the spraying could stop. In the summer there would be absolutely no bugs in the orchard, in the late fall you would start to see spiders and other vermin.
Every spray has to be proceeded by a NOI (notice of intent) filed with the county Ag Commissioner and each spray has to be recommended by a licensed Pest Control Adviser. At first I let my Adviser tell me when to spray and he had a few mess ups, so in my first year of a crop I had some worms. These have to be sorted out so I had to hire a couple of extra people to sort out the wormy apples in the field into the juice bin. None of the packing sheds want to pack them because they don't want to contaminate their facilities. The next year I had "bug bites" which are when your protective shield is down just enough for the moths to start chewing on the skin of the apple in preparation of laying the egg in there but you sprayed before they made it in. We just started picking and the fieldman from the packing shed comes out to check us out and I'm all happy because I don't see any worm holes and the guy tells me that my apples will be downgraded if I don't sort out the ones with bug bites on them. I look at him and say "bug bites? What the F--- IS THAT? I can feel the vein in my neck start pulsating.

After being asked to calm down several times he explains to me how this occurs and that they can be sorted out into a "volume fill" bin. These apples are sold to fruit stands at a discount because they aren't sized and the boxes aren't weighed they are just filled up with apples of varying size and color. The apples were picked into bags which are folded up on the bottom and a tractor goes through the field with the crew pulling a 4 bin trailer in which 3 bins are for the good ones and one bin is for volume fill or juice. By my second year of picking the Chinese were dumping apple concentrate on the world market and the price of juice apples had went from $100/ton to $20/ton which is the same price you pay to have them hauled to the place, so they weren't worth putting in the bin and hauling to the juice place so they were just thrown on the ground.
So that winter I was at an apple pruning seminar and I asked one of the other growers what he did for his worm control and he told me about the spraying every 25 days. I had already decided that I couldn't trust my crop, which I had about $125 K invested in, to my pest control adviser and his IPM stuff, it just didn't work in this situation.
I would have the spray dates on the calendar in my pickup and I scheduled any irrigation or summer pruning around these dates. I would call up my adviser a few days before this and tell him to order the stuff, have it delivered to my place, and file the NOI that I was spraying. He would tell me when to start in the spring and when to quit in the fall and there were also a few other sprays for scab, blight, and fungicides on the bloom, they were all done in the spring and I did whatever he told me to do on those, but on the worms I scheduled it.
After I adopted my scorched earth policy I didn't have any more of those as the field man is looking in one of the first bins picked "oh Steve look here, your apples have ______" conversations. Not only is it financially devestating but it's kind of like being told your wife is ugly, or your kid is dumb or something like that.
 
Most of the orchards around here were turned into farm land maybe twenty years ago . Several reasons probabley the most was it's a labor intensive business during harvest . Hard to find help and the profit was just not there .

Apple trees push out easy .A D6 Cat can pile up 10 acres in about a day ,more or less .

It didn't take long,shove them in wind rows and put the fire to them .They would burn about week or so .Then they scattered the ashes and ran a huge offset disc through the mess followed by a chisel plow .

The next spring it was growing corn . --Just that quick .
 
interesting steve, i never knew about what and when my grampa sprayed other than back in the day he sprayed ddt
 
Bodean said:
Um, I have an apple bid on Thursday,
I have that fruit pruning book too, I think it's from the 50's.
Click to expand...

that book is old, but has decent info on where in the cycle the fruit wood is,
i wish the isa would put out a book
we should be done with the fruit trees soon, buds are a swelling
 
I prune fruit trees lots here, especially at this time of year, for homeowners there aint no sprays left to use, city bylaws have banned most of them and many nurseries and box stores like Home Depot have stopped selling them. IPM is the way to be here, commmercially there are still sprays available but if its for cosmetic (IE lawn weeds, residential plant woes etc) use, it arent allowed.
 
watch them grow or pull them out or use infra red burners to torch em or weed whacker them....
 
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