Apple Tree

Gone are the days of orchards with towering apple trees. Not many of us have the kind of space in our home garden that a full-size tree requires. Plus, why struggle with a huge ladder at harvest time when you can grow a shorter, more compact, and more productive tree? Smaller trees are not only easier to care for but also, in many cases, more disease resistant. They tend to bear fruit earlier than their full-size cousins, as well. You will need to prune your apple tree—to train it to a central leader the first year and for maintenance every year after that—to stimulate fruit production and to keep the tree open and balanced.

Without regular pruning, an apple tree produces lots of vegetative growth that then turns into fruiting wood. If a tree has too much fruiting wood, it begins to produce too many apples, which weakens the tree and results in inferior—and eventually fewer and less palatable—apples. The key is to achieve a healthy balance of vegetative growth and fruiting wood so that the tree has enough energy to produce healthy apples.

Desirable apple varieties have been carefully bred over generations to have specific traits. Spur-type trees produce up to twice the amount of apples in a year as nonspur-type trees of the same size, and their habit is usually smaller than nonspur-type trees, making them more manageable. Need to perk up your home for the holidays? Learn how to easily and cheaply make a boxwood tree. Take your garden to the next level! It's that time of the year again. We know that the gardener in your life may be particularly hard to buy for during the holiday season. How does one buy….

In answer to your last question, yes, honeycrisp trees can take years to become established. A neighbor had some fruit trees cut down on his property a couple of years ago due to bee allergy and to thin them out. I received some of the mulch from the cut down trees. I now have several trees growing, which look like apple trees, where some of the left-over mulch had been. Is it safe to separate and move them now that they have grown so much?

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By the way, I have small pine trees that came up and grew the same way. In any case, you can certainly transplant small apple trees. I have 3 apple seedlings that are growing well. Bought the apples from a farmers market last fall and planted indoors in Jan. Do they need to be hardened off before planting in ground? And, its been chilly 60's day, mid 40's at night and windy. Also, if I get apples in the future, will it be one of the parents of the apple I grew seed from?

Commercial apples bought in grocery stores are mostly hybrids, not designed to be fertile.

I've got maybe 15 trees growing from seeds from "organic" apples that I've eaten. They've been growing for about 4 or 5 years too. They've gotten tall, and are looking nice, but I still haven't seen any apples growing yet, so I guess, the organic seeds from organic apples from grocery stores, won't produce either. But I'm still waiting to see. Yes, as it says above, choose a sunny site. I have a yellow delicious apple tree. It grew it's first apples last year, about 9 of them, I removed the small ones but left 9.

I pruned the branches lightly at the beginning of March , im in ohio, it has beautiful green leaves but no blooms the crab apples have blooms but my tree has none. Skip to main content. Planting Apple Trees and Harvesting Apples. As a general rule, if a tree is termed hardy, it grows best in Hardiness Zones 3 to 5.

Apple - Wikipedia

If termed long-season, apple quality will be best in Zones 5 to 8. Each variety has a number of chill hours needed to set fruit i. The farther north you go, the more chill hours an apple variety needs to avoid late spring freeze problems. Your local Cooperative Extension Service can instruct you in collecting the soil sample, help you interpret the results, and provide valuable information about the soil in your county. Results from the soil test will determine the soil amendments necessary to correct nutrient deficiencies and adjust soil pH.

Apple trees need well-drained soil, nothing too wet. Choose a sunny site. Tree spacing is influenced by the rootstock, soil fertility, and pruning. Seedlings or full-size trees should be planted about 15 to 18 feet apart in a row. Dwarf apple trees are notoriously prone to uprooting under the weight of a heavy crop, so you should provide a support system for your hedge. After you purchase the tree, protect it from injury, drying out, freezing, or overheating. Dig a hole approximately twice the diameter of the root system and 2 feet deep.

Place some of the loose soil back into the hole and loosen the soil on the walls of the planting hole so the roots can easily penetrate the soil. Spread the tree roots on the loose soil, making sure they are not twisted or crowded in the hole. Continue to replace soil around the roots. Most apple trees are grafted. The graft union must be at least 2 inches above the soil line so that roots do not emerge from the scion.

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Bend a stem down almost horizontally for a few weeks to slow growth and promote branches and fruiting. Prune your mature tree when it is dormant. After about ten years, fruiting spurs stubby branches that elongate only about a half-inch per year become overcrowded and decrepit. Mid season varieties should keep for a few weeks, while late season varieties will stay in good condition for anywhere up to five months in a root cellar. The central flower of the inflorescence is called the "king bloom"; it opens first and can develop a larger fruit.

The fruit matures in late summer or autumn, and cultivars exist with a wide range of sizes. The skin of ripe apples is generally red, yellow, green, pink, or russetted although many bi- or tri-colored cultivars may be found. The skin is covered in a protective layer of epicuticular wax. The original wild ancestor of Malus pumila was Malus sieversii , found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan , and Xinjiang , China. Significant exchange with Malus sylvestris , the crabapple, resulted in current populations of apples being more related to crabapples than to the more morphologically similar progenitor Malus sieversii.

In strains without recent admixture the contribution of the latter predominates. In , an Italian-led consortium announced they had sequenced the complete genome of the apple in collaboration with horticultural genomicists at Washington State University , [12] using ' Golden Delicious '. Understanding the genes behind these characteristics will allow scientists to perform more knowledgeable selective breeding.

The genome sequence also provided proof that Malus sieversii was the wild ancestor of the domestic apple—an issue that had been long-debated in the scientific community. The center of diversity of the genus Malus is in eastern present-day Turkey. The apple tree was perhaps the earliest tree to be cultivated, [16] and its fruits have been improved through selection over thousands of years. An United States apples nursery catalogue sold of the "best" cultivars, showing the proliferation of new North American cultivars by the early 19th century.

Until the 20th century, farmers stored apples in frostproof cellars during the winter for their own use or for sale. Improved transportation of fresh apples by train and road replaced the necessity for storage. Controlled atmosphere facilities use high humidity, low oxygen, and controlled carbon dioxide levels to maintain fruit freshness. They were first used in the United States in the s. Ellis Davidson links apples to religious practices in Germanic paganism , from which Norse paganism developed.

Further, Davidson notes that the potentially Germanic goddess Nehalennia is sometimes depicted with apples and that parallels exist in early Irish stories. Davidson asserts that while cultivation of the apple in Northern Europe extends back to at least the time of the Roman Empire and came to Europe from the Near East , the native varieties of apple trees growing in Northern Europe are small and bitter.

Apples appear in many religious traditions , often as a mystical or forbidden fruit. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology and folktales is that the word "apple" was used as a generic term for all foreign fruit, other than berries, including nuts, as late as the 17th century.

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The Greek goddess of discord, Eris , became disgruntled after she was excluded from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera , Athena , and Aphrodite.

Growing Apples

Paris of Troy was appointed to select the recipient. After being bribed by both Hera and Athena, Aphrodite tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. He awarded the apple to Aphrodite, thus indirectly causing the Trojan War. The apple was thus considered, in ancient Greece, to be sacred to Aphrodite, and to throw an apple at someone was to symbolically declare one's love; and similarly, to catch it was to symbolically show one's acceptance of that love. An epigram claiming authorship by Plato states: I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.

Atalanta , also of Greek mythology, raced all her suitors in an attempt to avoid marriage. She outran all but Hippomenes also known as Melanion , a name possibly derived from melon the Greek word for both "apple" and fruit in general , [28] who defeated her by cunning, not speed. Hippomenes knew that he could not win in a fair race, so he used three golden apples gifts of Aphrodite, the goddess of love to distract Atalanta. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes was finally successful, winning the race and Atalanta's hand.

Though the forbidden fruit of Eden in the Book of Genesis is not identified, popular Christian tradition has held that it was an apple that Eve coaxed Adam to share with her. Renaissance painters may also have been influenced by the story of the golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides. As a result, in the story of Adam and Eve, the apple became a symbol for knowledge, immortality, temptation, the fall of man into sin, and sin itself. The larynx in the human throat has been called the " Adam's apple " because of a notion that it was caused by the forbidden fruit remaining in the throat of Adam.

There are more than 7, known cultivars of apples. The UK's national fruit collection database contains a wealth of information on the characteristics and origin of many apples, including alternative names for what is essentially the same "genetic" apple cultivar. Most of these cultivars are bred for eating fresh dessert apples , though some are cultivated specifically for cooking cooking apples or producing cider. Cider apples are typically too tart and astringent to eat fresh, but they give the beverage a rich flavor that dessert apples cannot.

Commercially popular apple cultivars are soft but crisp. Other desired qualities in modern commercial apple breeding are a colorful skin, absence of russeting , ease of shipping, lengthy storage ability, high yields, disease resistance, common apple shape, and developed flavor. Most North Americans and Europeans favor sweet, subacid apples, but tart apples have a strong minority following. Old cultivars are often oddly shaped, russeted, and have a variety of textures and colors. Some find them to have a better flavor than modern cultivars, [42] but they may have other problems which make them commercially unviable—low yield, disease susceptibility, poor tolerance for storage or transport, or just being the "wrong" size.

A few old cultivars are still produced on a large scale, but many have been preserved by home gardeners and farmers that sell directly to local markets. Many unusual and locally important cultivars with their own unique taste and appearance exist; apple conservation campaigns have sprung up around the world to preserve such local cultivars from extinction.

In the United Kingdom, old cultivars such as ' Cox's Orange Pippin ' and ' Egremont Russet ' are still commercially important even though by modern standards they are low yielding and susceptible to disease.

Tips for Growing Apple Trees

Many apples grow readily from seeds. However, more than with most perennial fruits, apples must be propagated asexually by grafting to obtain the sweetness and other desirable characteristics of the parent. This is because seedling apples are an example of " extreme heterozygotes ", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.

Even in the case when a triploid plant can produce a seed apples are an example , it occurs infrequently, and seedlings rarely survive. Because apples do not breed true when planted as seeds, grafting is generally used to produce new apple trees. The rootstock used for the bottom of the graft can be selected to produce trees of a large variety of sizes, as well as changing the winter hardiness, insect and disease resistance, and soil preference of the resulting tree.

Dwarf rootstocks can be used to produce very small trees less than 3. Alexander the Great sent samples of dwarf apple trees to Aristotle 's Lyceum.

Dwarf rootstocks became common by the 15th century and later went through several cycles of popularity and decline throughout the world. The East Malling Research Station conducted extensive research into rootstocks, and today their rootstocks are given an "M" prefix to designate their origin. Most new apple cultivars originate as seedlings, which either arise by chance or are bred by deliberately crossing cultivars with promising characteristics.

Apples can also form bud sports mutations on a single branch. Some bud sports turn out to be improved strains of the parent cultivar. Some differ sufficiently from the parent tree to be considered new cultivars. Since the s, the Excelsior Experiment Station at the University of Minnesota has introduced a steady progression of important apples that are widely grown, both commercially and by local orchardists, throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Its most important contributions have included ' Haralson ' which is the most widely cultivated apple in Minnesota , ' Wealthy ', 'Honeygold', and ' Honeycrisp '. Apples have been acclimatized in Ecuador at very high altitudes, where they can often, with the needed factors, provide crops twice per year because of constant temperate conditions year-round.

Apples are self-incompatible; they must cross-pollinate to develop fruit. During the flowering each season, apple growers often utilize pollinators to carry pollen. Honey bees are most commonly used. Orchard mason bees are also used as supplemental pollinators in commercial orchards.

Bumblebee queens are sometimes present in orchards, but not usually in enough quantity to be significant pollinators. Cultivars are sometimes classified by the day of peak bloom in the average day blossom period, with pollenizers selected from cultivars within a 6-day overlap period. Cultivars vary in their yield and the ultimate size of the tree, even when grown on the same rootstock.

Some cultivars, if left unpruned, will grow very large, which allows them to bear much more fruit, but makes harvesting very difficult. Apples are harvested using three-point ladders that are designed to fit amongst the branches. Farms with apple orchards may open them to the public, so consumers may themselves pick the apples they will purchase. Crops ripen at different times of the year according to the cultivar.

Commercially, apples can be stored for some months in controlled atmosphere chambers to delay ethylene -induced ripening.

Crisp, juicy fruit is within your reach if you keep these six things in mind

Apples are commonly stored in chambers with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and high air filtration. This prevents ethylene concentrations from rising to higher amounts and preventing ripening from occurring too quickly. For home storage, most cultivars of apple can be held for approximately two weeks when kept at the coolest part of the refrigerator i. Some can be stored up to a year without significant degradation. Non-organic apples may be sprayed with 1-methylcyclopropene blocking the apples' ethylene receptors, temporarily preventing them from ripening.

Apple trees are susceptible to a number of fungal and bacterial diseases and insect pests. Many commercial orchards pursue a program of chemical sprays to maintain high fruit quality, tree health, and high yields. These prohibit the use of synthetic pesticides, though some older pesticides are allowed.

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Organic methods include, for instance, introducing its natural predator to reduce the population of a particular pest. Among the most serious disease problems are fireblight , a bacterial disease; and Gymnosporangium rust and black spot , two fungal diseases. Young apple trees are also prone to mammal pests like mice and deer, which feed on the soft bark of the trees, especially in winter.

World production of apples in was A typical apple serving weighs grams and provides calories with a moderate content of dietary fiber table. All parts of the fruit, including the skin, except for the seeds, are suitable for human consumption.