Honey Crisp Apple Tree Story

When we moved here, we wanted to plant some fruit trees, since that was something we couldn't really do much in Alaska where we lived before. Since we live in an area with cold winters, we were careful to buy trees suitable for our climate. We bought an apricot tree, 2 peach trees, a pear tree and two apple trees and were excited to have our own tiny orchard. It took the apple trees several years to mature enough to actually start getting fruit. It wasn't long after we got our first couple of apples that we moved away for 18 months, so were gone during 2 apple seasons. When we returned our housesitters commented that the apples were 'no good'. I didn't pay much attention, but maybe I should have.

The next spring, the apple trees bloomed normally, but soon the flowers dropped off and the trees looked sick. One of them never got any leaves. On the other the leaves turned black in areas. Our pear tree seemed to have a similar problem. Needless to say, no apples appeared. We were told that our trees were suffering from fire blight. We pruned off the sick branches and got rid of them, but in spite of our best efforts, one of the apple trees died. The other apple and pear looked pretty sick. Soon the pear tree also died. The one remaining apple tree had leaves but no apples. We still had to keep trimming blighted parts of the trees.

This spring, when it was time to prune our remaining fruit trees, we looked at the remaining apple tree and decided not to prune it since it seemed likely that it would soon be dead. Much to our surprise, the tree bloomed profusely. We waited for the blossoms to fall off and the tree to die, but soon little apples began to form. Lots of little apples. We waited for the little apples to shrivel up and turn black. They did not. They grew larger. Soon the woodworker decided he better start thinning out some of those apples. He probably removed 2/3 or more of the apples on the tree. The remaining apples did not shrivel and they did not die!







Then we noticed that it was difficult to get close to the tree because there were so many wasps or yellow jackets around the tree, so we hung wasp traps on the tree. That seemed to help a lot.



Now that the apples are starting to turn we are anticipating some delicious eating...and the poor tree is probably looking forward to getting some of the extra weight off its branches. I guess next year we had better prune it.