Bill,

Unfortunately it's too late for the most important spray of the season, but 
you need to be ready next year. That is the dormant oil spray as winter 
ends. Pick a nice sunny day in late winter/early spring before the buds 
start to break. Be sure to wet the tree thoroughly and get the spray into 
all the crevices in the bark. This non-toxic spray will suffocate most 
overwintering pests and their eggs. Also to remove overwintering pests, 
remove all leaves, dropped limbs, etc in the fall. Keep the area under the 
trees clean of any debris.

It's quite likely that if there is any damage to this year's fruit, it has 
already happened, so the prebloom spray is also highly important. Take any 
fruit that already shows insect damage off the tree and burn or bury it so 
the pests cannot complete their life cycle.

Some non-toxic pesticides are available. Surround will help with codling 
moth; it is a fine kaolin clay and water mixture, probably with some kind of 
sticker, that coats the fruit and makes it unattractive to the adults. You 
can also trap the adults with sticky balls that they think are fruit and 
land to lay eggs, only to stick forever.

If you are surrounded by wild land, it will help a lot, as soon as you clean 
up what has been overwintering on your old trees. If you have other apples 
around you, you'll be pretty much stuck with following their program. Here 
in coastal South Carolina, where I have a number of low-chill apple trees, I 
have only sprayed insecticide once in five years - and I think I was 
premature at that time. We have (and encourage) a lot of ladybugs, wheelbugs 
and other assassin bugs, mantises, soldier beetles, etc., and they are 
building up and getting so efficient that I've only seen a couple japanese 
beetles in the last two years. On the apples, we have never had coddling 
moth or apple maggot. The only pests are wooly apple aphid, green apple 
aphid and occasional bagworms. It helps that we are surrounded on three 
sides by woodland.

The one time I sprayed was Malathion for aphids in my first year - and I 
think now I could have given the lady bugs a bit more time, as they have 
doen an excellent job with the aphids since. Or I could have used Safer 
soap, which kills by suffocation not by poisoning.

If you do put on a poison, make sure you get complete petal fall before 
application. Also mow or otherwise remove any bloom of any kind that will 
receive any of the poison - such as dandelion, henbit and clovers, so that 
foraging bees don't pick up the poison from them.

When I managed an orchard, we kept bees alongside the orchard year around 
and monitored them. We had a pretty much normal spray program, except that 
we never used any Penncap M, or Sevin dust, which are long lasting and get 
into the pollen, but we did use Sevin in liquid formulations. All spraying 
was done between dusk and midnight, and we did not allow any orchard floor 
bloom to be present for contamination of the nectar/pollen supplies. We 
never had any detectable loss of bees.

Mites were always more difficult to control than insects. We had one block 
of orchard that was about ten miles from the rest of the farm, and it was 
away from other orchards on a drumlin surrounded by woods and wooded swamp. 
In that block we never used a miticide. There were so many predators (mostly 
mites themselves) coming into the orchard that they kept pest mites cleaned 
up.

You need a jeweler's loupe and some knowledge to identify the mites. If you 
have pest mites, and your leaves turn bronze by late summer, you will have 
hurt the following year's crop.

I hope this helps.

Be sure to train your young trees. A lot of varieties put out limbs that 
reach for the sky and they must be spread to give them more light, slow 
their wild growth and form buds for next year's fruit. These buds are 
already forming and will be fully determined within about a month from now.

Dave in SC


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Greenrose" <[log in to unmask]>


After five years in the ground, it looks like I will get a decent crop of 
apples from the trees I planted.  There are not many trees, just a Zestar, a 
Honeycrisp and a Macoun, along with a couple of ancient apple trees that far 
predate my arrival (one being my 'swarm-catcher').  Had a small crop of 
apples last year from the Zestar and Honeycrisp, but they were inedible, due 
to insect attack.  Without spraying, there is virtually nothing edible on 
the older trees, so it looks like, if I want apples, I have to spray.

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