I realize that I am bragging, but this morning I picked up and carried a Holstein heifer, a horse, a unicorn, a mermaid, a lop-eared rabbit, four m&ms and a three year-old child IN JUST ONE TRIP!
A note on fireblight
Most heirloom apples are relatively susceptible to diseases. Back then, people were not as concerned about the cosmetics of the fruit as they are today.
Fireblight is the most devastating of apple and pear diseases. It often kills the tree. Today, there are chemicals that can control the disease but the organism keeps mutating and new strains evolve that elude the control measure.
Lists of fireblight resistance can be frustrating because there is often disagreement about how resistant any given cultivar is. That often comes back to:
- An apple cultivar can be resistant to one strain but not others. Breeders now expose selections to three, highly virulent strains of fireblight as a sorting tool.
- Fireblight often enters through the blossoms and cultivars that blossom later are vulnerable when weather conditions most favor fireblight...that is, the weather at the time of blooming is a huge variable.
Many of those "Very resistant" varieties with salable sized fruit are introductions from modern breeding programs where fireblight resistance was one of the primary selection criteria.
There was a fruit grower in Southern Indiana named Ed Fackler and he worked very hard to grow organic fruit. He originally bought into the hype that the apple cultivars of yesteryear were more disease resistant than modern apples. He fruited more than 400 heirloom varieties. He almost caused a riot when he announced in a large NAFEX meeting in 1990 that "Most heirloom apple varieties are almost extinct for very good reasons. They are of mediocre quality and riddled with disease issues."
It is telling that an apple tree only had to be just a little bit better than the other five seedling apple trees in Farmer Jones's orchard before the proud farmer named the variety after his wife or local celebrity. If you were a new settler in the area and Farmer Jones offered you a root-sucker from his prize tree, you were a fool to turn it down.
It isn't hard to win a beauty contest when there are only six contestants. The ratio between seeds that are germinated and cultivars that are named in modern programs is on the order of 100,000:1.
Fireblight was less of an issue because apple orchards were widely separated and the "indigenous strains" of fireblight either targeted Hawthorns (Crataegus) or the very late blooming Malus coronaria
I am the only one in my area who has apple trees, there were 2 pink ladies the rest were seedling trees of apple and pear.
ReplyDeleteEvery year I lose trees to fire blight.
This spring the second pink lady started showing signs.
I got some very bad fire blight on my blue plums, which I ended up cutting down and burning. So far, none on my apples, which are a mix of old and new varieties. No fire blight on Japanese plums, or on my ashmedes kernal, which is right near the blue plum spot.
ReplyDeleteLook at some pictures of "Black Knot Disease" on the internet. The problem your blue plum had is much more likely to be Black Knot than fire blight. The good news is that Black Knot does not affect apples and Japanese plums have some resistance to it.
DeleteOf the European plums, President and Bluebyrd are advertised as being resistant to it.