The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Fruit => Topic started by: goosepimple on August 08, 2014, 03:03:14 pm
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Our young orchard produced quite well last year but this year we've next to nowt, literally. The plums are doing well but only 2 measly apples.
How are you apples doing? Are we just unlucky?
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My apples are doing really well. We have 1 ;D
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Such a big year last year (400 litres of cider still left to be consumed!) and I thought it would be a poor year. The bramley in the garden which I took over 400kilos off has about two apples on it, but the young trees in the orchard which didn't fruit too well last year are laden. Weird.
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Depends on how early the trees blossom. In this area the damson crop is excellent as blossom time coincided with the mild spell mid-Spring, which also gave an early boost to the nectar available to local bees. . Most of our neighbours with apple trees found blossom time coincided with the following colder, wet weather and have a very poor, or non-existent, crop. Our own trees are old, unidentified local varieties but they blossomed late and are laden.
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Loads of apples but they are a bit small - I should have thinned them. No pears, and hardly any plums or damsons except for a Victoria plum. All down to the timing of the blossom I think :thinking:
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I had a cox apple in my last garden that only fruited well every other year whereas my (only) other red devil did so every year.
Here the old badly planted orchard i inherited has loads of apples.. many trees with unsightly blotches and the summer apple and plums covered covered in wasps and wasp craters.
The new trees i put in three years ago.. well a few have a couple or three apples on but since they're all being espaliered it does knock them back. I'll be forming the third and finally tiers this autumn and I'd expect (given half decent weather) to get a reasonable crop of a dozen or so from each one next year. After that they'll really start to come into their own and they'll be easy to spray and monitor.
Not a pear though and one williams was really covered in blossom
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Out old Bramleys doing well and did well last year but not the year before. I was told that older trees sometimes get a bit biennial….
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I bought a fan trained Apple tree when we moved and planted it in my greenhouse. It was doing great, loads of blossom and I had about a dozen apples starting to develop. However every single one fell off the tree when it was still a little green ball. Anyone know why this might have been?
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Wow. Is it so cold up there you have to grow apples in a greenhouse?
You get the june drop anyway with apples and i'd guess any additonal stress.. lack of water, too hot etc would exacerbate the amount. Perhaps finessing it by reducing the burden?
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Lol, Actually, it's not that cold up here, it's the wind and salt that does the trees in. I was hoping it was just stress of planting. What do you mean by reducing the burden? There are no apples left on it now so whatever I try will have to wait until next year
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I had a cox apple in my last garden that only fruited well every other year
Cox has a tendency to bear biennially. Summer pruning in August - reducing the new shoots to around 4 leaves - has stopped this on the tree we inherited from the previous owners. Seems to encourage the production of fruit spurs rather than growth.
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Lol, Actually, it's not that cold up here, it's the wind and salt that does the trees in. I was hoping it was just stress of planting. What do you mean by reducing the burden? There are no apples left on it now so whatever I try will have to wait until next year
exactly. Watch the june drop and then thin a bit more..better a few good apples than none.
Isn't there soem way of grwoing them outside with appropriate windbear? assuming one or two prime wind directions. Even here my fruit trees need locating away from the prevailing.
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It is possible to grow outside in the shelter of the town's but we are on an exposed hillside next to the sea and there is no other windbreaks around to provide shelter. Eventually I hope to grow some hedges to provide shelter, I've put some willow in which is doing well and a neighbour is bringing me a clump of Rosa rugosa to plant as a hedge, it does really well here. But all that takes time so for the time being apples in the greenhouse :tree: :tree:
So when fruit starts dropping g in June I should thin out a few more to help the tree along?
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I have a good crop of apples, pears and plums to come. Even my cherry produced a few this year.
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So when fruit starts dropping g in June I should thin out a few more to help the tree along?
Thin out the mutiples to singles and thin to space them out - was how i dealt with my espaliered red devil in the last place.
As ever it comes down to money and enthusiasm and space, layout.. No reason you can't built a windbreak before the hedges come in. If they'll grow there then silver birch is nice. Unless you're an enthusiast with willow I find it a royal pain keeping under control and every bit you chop off wants to grow somewhere...
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Thanks for replies .... it was such a lovely year for blossom this year, but as many of you say it may be down to timing ... and a good year for everyone last year on fruiting, so not so this year for most of us (sept you Mads!).
Oh well, maybe make plans for next years bumper crop then :D at least it's not something we've done or not done that's the cause.
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North west of you plums , pears no prob but no apples around here , was lots of blossom
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There are lots of blackberries on the roadside bushes. I didn't expect that 2 years in a row. :) Mmm I love blackberries
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There are lots of blackberries on the roadside bushes. I didn't expect that 2 years in a row. :) Mmm I love blackberries
Eat them staight from the bramble for a high protein meal or salty water and surprise..... :innocent:
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Just come back from walking the dog and ate a few as I went along ;D
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My Bramleys are doing well despite removing a couple of huge branches at last winter pruning. I've not thinned enough but there are lots self falling so I have left them to it. The one remaining plum tree looks fine too, tho they're not as advanced as the apples strangely. Damsons had loads of blossom but got a leaf curl problem and most blossom didn't bear fruit tho there is new leaf growth and a few damsons visible. The younger trees aren't producing much as yet, if anything - Discover has 2 wee fruits but both very red already, I'm just letting them be this year, likewise my one poor wee pear which lost half it's branches last year and is in recovery.
Strangely the berries have been really early and all but gone already, rasps were on full flow in July but waning now, my thornless blackberry is hopeless, berries huge and juicy but not coming off the stalk except in mush and now the wasps have got to those :( Brambles across the road are coming along better so may go wild again. Rowan trees around here are already full of red fruit which is again early I think. Not sure what to make of it all so I just go with the flow..
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The established trees that we have had a great show of blossom but I've only counted about 10 apples. We have one plum - that's singular plum, not tree. No pears and no cherries.
The young trees that I planted are doing proportionally better, but of course I have to snip the fruit off for the health of the roots.
Maybe next year will be better.
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wev plenty of apples this year.
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Loads of apples here too - and other fruit really (although the birds nicked all the cherries but we've had apricots and peaches - yay!). I've had to strip most of the apples off our baby trees early - the birds have been landing on them and breaking branches (including some of the major ones I'd selected as part of the structural pruning grrr) so it was easier in the end to take them all off and feed them to the turkeys and geese who fight over them. But the older trees are pretty laden and nearly ripe.
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A ripe plum caught my eye yesterday, so I've been down to have a look at the fruit trees. One plum tree has a good crop, the other nothing. I picked a few plums, but there were only a few ripe enough to pick. Bramley apple is laden, and the eating apple ( I don't know the variety, but they are quite tasty) looks to have a reasonable crop.
Nothing on the greengage, I already had checked it thoroughly, a few times, it's been planted for four years, and so far has produced nada! :(
Beth
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I have apples on one tree but not on the other 2. They did have flowers in the Spring for the first time so I expect they are just young.