Which of the following fruit and nut trees should I plant?

[Caliga]

Today I de-staked all of my trees (though I'm probably going to have to partly re-stake the goddamn Granny Smith since that tree does NOT want to stand straight  ) and sprayed them all with Ortho Volck dormant oil.  Take that, scale insects, aphids, and thrips.

Might do a spray of Immunox later, or if not next weekend.  I'm also going to probably get some hardware cloth and use it to make anti-vole and rabbit barriers around the apple trees, since they're at the edge of the woods and my woods are filled with varmints.

[mongers]

Today I de-staked all of my trees (though I'm probably going to have to partly re-stake the goddamn Granny Smith since that tree does NOT want to stand straight  ) and sprayed them all with Ortho Volck dormant oil.  Take that, scale insects, aphids, and thrips.

Might do a spray of Immunox later, or if not next weekend.  I'm also going to probably get some hardware cloth and use it to make anti-vole and rabbit barriers around the apple trees, since they're at the edge of the woods and my woods are filled with varmints.

Any plans to protect them from roadrunners as well, I'm told the Acme Corporation has some nice products.  ?

[fhdz]

For chrissakes quit spraying the fucking things with everything under the sun.

[mongers]

For chrissakes quit spraying the fucking things with everything under the sun.

But what would he then do with the C-123 ?

[Caliga]

For chrissakes quit spraying the fucking things with everything under the sun.

It's either that, or no fruit.... and all I use is dormant oil (which is basically just mineral oil) and Immunox.  I'm going to try bagging any fruit I get this year so I don't have to spray the fruit itself.

[Admiral Yi]

With your cost of labor those will end up being $30 dollar apples. 

[Caliga]

$30 an hour?  My time is worth more than that 

[fhdz]

$30 an hour?  My time is worth more than that 

You don't work nearly as hard as a regular fruit picker.

[Admiral Yi]

$30 an hour?  My time is worth more than that 

No doubt.  I just figured that you could manage more than one apple an hour.

[The Brain]

$30 an hour?  My time is worth more than that 

No doubt.  I just figured that you could manage more than one apple an hour.

[Caliga]

I just built a homemade tree guard for my Granny Smith.

I took a two-foot wide roll of 1/4 inch hardware cloth and cut it to a strip about 6 feet in diameter with aviation snips, wrapped it around a tree stake, and tied it to both itself and the tree stake with wire, and then pushed mulch all around the outside of the perimeter.  I'm really glad I chose to do this with the Granny Smith first, because until now I had all of my trees wrapped in white tree wrap which I just tied off with twine, and when I unwrapped the Granny Smith--which as of right now still hasn't broken its buds--I found that shoots were coming out of the trunk below the graft union.   Meanwhile, my Pink Lady has bloomed out and is already putting out leaves.  So I need to basically dump a fuckton around the base of the trunk to make sure the graft is totally buried or it's just gonna keep doing that.

[Caliga]

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Remember how I said the Granny Smith was putting out shoots beneath the graft union?  Well it turns out that it was doing that because the union seems to have failed and the crown has died.   For now I'm leaving the tree alone because something interesting is happening with it.  The roots are making a bid to survive by sending shoots out of the ground.  From the way these leaves look (serrated edges as opposed to the Granny Smith's smooth edged leaves) and my skillz with Teh Google, it appears the tree is on an M111 apple rootstock.  I was debating what to do next when I noticed the other day the the scion above the graft is also now producing leaves directly on the trunk, but they're too small yet to tell much about their characteristics.

I'm thinking of two possible options here:

1.  Cut the crown off and then cut the trunk back to the union, and let the rootstock produce a tree.  It looks like the M111 was derived from the Northern Spy apple, which is a decent apple.  However, I don't know if the modern Northern Spy is typically grown from its own roots so the resulting tree might be marginally productive, and since it wouldn't be clonal might provide me with nonstandard Northern Spy fruit.  So this is a risky option, but the experimental nature of it interests me.  If I get a unique apple from it with positive qualities, I shall name it the Languish and attempt to market it.

2.  Cut the trunk back to the obviously still-living portion of the scion and then attempt to perform my own graft.  Since I have another apple tree (see below) I have a ready source for a new scion, and in addition Princesca has some co-workers who have home orchards who could also probably donate scions so we could still have more than one apple varietal planted at the house.

Speaking of the other tree, it's the Pink Lady and right now it is KICKING ASS with explosive vegetative growth.   Further, the last time I took count it had about a dozen apples forming on it, but the foliage is so dense right now I'm not sure I can see them all.  The dense foliage is intentional on my part; when I pruned this tree in the late winter I did a large number of heading cuts, which stimulated heavy branching growth.  The reason?  The tree wasn't properly pruned by the nursery and originally had three leaders with extremely tight branching angles.  This winter I removed the one with the worst angle, and next winter I intend to remove the second one, after which the tree will have a true central leader... but doing that will remove a huge percentage of the tree's crown, so I want there to be tons of other branches by then to minimize disruption to the tree's continued growth.

Also, the peach I planted last year died as well.   In that case, I'm sure it was my fault for planting it too deeply in compacted clay and then over-watering it when we had a drought over the summer.  The roots almost certainly rotted out.  I'll probably pull it up tomorrow and get another peach to replace it, preferably a more mature one this time.  The last time I was at Lowe's they had some peaches for sale that actually had fruit on them.

[Razgovory]

Great, another Union bashing thread.

[Caliga]

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Pink Lady is growing at an explosive rate and is now taller than me.  I was trying to avoid pruning it, but the growth is so out of control I had to take some waterspouts off of it last weekend since it was turning into basically a ball of branches, and with the wind resistance getting fucked up by heavy winds.... so much so that I came home from work last Friday and found it to be leaning at like a 50 degree angle.   I righted it and had to re-stake it, which I'm not too happy about, but I am happy that it's got about 8 apples on it.

Against all odds, the Granny Smith seems to be... coming back to life.  I shall hereafter refer to her as Zombie Granny Smith.  The branches still look dead but leaves are sprouting up the trunk.  I'm glad I didn't cut 'er down but I seriously have no idea what the fuck is going on there.

I tried to pull the 'dead' peach up last weekend but couldn't uproot it manually, so I got a hacksaw and cut it off at ground level and tried to dig the roots up, only to discover that.... they were still alive as well.   Beneath the mulch they were sending shoots up too, just like the Granny Smith.  It's bizarre that the same thing happened to two of my trees over the same winter.  It wasn't hardly cold at all here so it shouldn't have been some sort of deep freeze die-off or anything like that.  I got a replacement peach tree (JH Hale) variety and didn't have time to plant it, so it's living on my back deck for now.  It's got about six baby peaches on it.

[katmai]

Fucking NecroCal.