Fertilizer, tying down branches and pollinators

The end of June is a good time to walk around the orchard and vineyard and assess how things are going.

Due to an early start to the season in terms of Growing Degree Days and a frost, the fruit set on the various trees in the orchard is not uniform. The Asian pears that carried the show last year were in the most vulnerable stage when the frosts came. No Asian pears this year.

European pears look good. Liberty apple is doing the heavy lifting, as usual. The oldest Gold Rush tree (on MM106) is loaded.

I have pollinator varieties grafted into most of my apple trees. Most of them have much M. baccata in their pedigree and the flowers are bright-white to greenish-white while domestic apples have white flowers with a hint of pink. That matters because honeybees key into color and potentially won't move between greenish-white to pinkish white flowers.

Maybe I had bumblebees doing most of the pollinating or maybe having the pollinator branch IN the canopy of the tree made it so the honeybees ignored their color matching rule.

The two Crimson Crisp that did not have a pollinator in it has poor fruit set. The apples with a branch (and some of the branches quite small) had nice fruit loads.

One Enterprise apple has far too many apples on it. I was hoping for a solid "June drop" but it still has too many. I need to thin it down to about five per branch. It is still a young tree and I don't want it to runt-out.

I had some trees that needed to have branches spread. It is hard to beat a gallon milk jug (filled with water for ballast) and baling twine for the task. I tie the bottom of the twine to the jug. Then I bend the branches on the young trees to about 45 degrees from horizontal and use a taut line hitch to tie it to the branch. The taut line hitch gives me flexibility in tightening or loosening the line. I can also move the jug around to ensure each branch has its proper place in the sun.

At this time of year I only need to keep the branches tied down for two or three days. That is about how long it takes them to take a set. Then I can move the twine-and-jugs to other branches that need it. I get a little bit of spring-back but I still consider it to be well worth the effort.

Sunday being a day of rest, I tied a few branches. I threw some fertilizer around, including around the tree I was concerned might runt-out. I mowed a little bit of grass.

The only caution about fertilizing is that excessive fertilizer can delay a tree hardening off for winter and reduce its cold hardiness. The flip side is that bearing too much of a fruit load with too small of a leaf  canopy to ripen it will also reduce winter hardiness. It should be obvious that a grower in southern Michigan has a much friendlier window to work with than somebody growing fruit in North Dakota. Friendlier, but not infinite. I have lost apple trees in the winter and I attribute it to late apples, excessive fruit load and a tender rootstock.