Anybody Spray Apple Trees?

[RalphVa]

I had rotten luck with apple trees here but had peach and plum and got stuff from them until Brown Rot hit.

Best protection for any fruit tree is to spray a couple times during the dormant season with dormant oil. As a young chemical engineer, I once designed a distillation unit to manufacture it. It's just a very narrow cut of light diesel. It suffocates the bugs in their winter hibernation.

Next best thing for any pitted fruit would be to spray a solution of 9 to 10/1 water/milk (any milk) around bud break time as protection against brown rot.

Otherwise, I wouldn't do any more sprays unless you want your fruit to be equally as poisonous as what you buy in the store. The typical in-store (non organic) stuff has been sprayed to high heaven. Yeah, tastes good and looks good and probably isn't bad for you, particularly if you peal your apple first. Cannot see doing it in one's own orchard.

The dormant oil will get most bugs, and (hopefully) the milk solution may stop brown rot. Next stop: kill a couple squirrels every year to keep them from robbing you of your fruit.

Ralph

 

[Larry Caldwell]

One of the most important things about orchards is sanitation. The moths that cause worms in apples are not good flyers. The worms burrow out of the apple and pupate in the grass under the tree, then fly up to plant eggs in the next year's blossoms. It's common to remove all grass under fruit trees, with very shallow (1" deep) tillage. Spraying the ground rather than the trees, or spreading malathion dust/granules under the trees during blossom season is popular.

Pruning is necessary to get good production out of an orchard, but the older the tree the more work it is. Fruit trees are often replaced every 20 years or so because the labor to keep an old tree in production becomes prohibitive.