This is the year I am determined to have a glut of apples come September. So a plan of action is called for.
My McIntosh, like so many apple trees on the Front Range, suffers from occasional bouts of fire blight. McIntosh is labeled fire-blight resistant, and so it is. Unfortunately fire-blight resistance lowers but does not eliminate the risk. This nasty bacterial disease affects apples and their close relatives, crab apples, mountain ash, pear, cotoneaster, hawthorn, pyracantha and serviceberry.
The damage fire blight causes is distinctive: Ends of branches turn unnaturally reddish, then black. You can spray with streptomycin (expensive) or copper (bothersome) when the trees are flowering, but it’s easier just to cut out affected parts. To prevent spreading the disease, spray pruners with Lysol after each cut.
Fire blight I can live with — thus far I’ve never had to deal with any of the other scourges that can plague apple trees in our region, among them woolly apple aphid, San Jose scale, tree hoppers, several types of borers, crown rots, white apple leafhopper, tentiform leafworms, powdery mildew, a host of mite species, cedar-apple rust, tent caterpillar, speckled green fruit worm, apple flea beetle, aphids and leaf rollers.
Fruit can be damaged by apple maggot, earwigs, leaf rollers, Oriental fruit moth, speckle green fruitworm, apple scab, plant bugs, stink bugs, apple curculio, rosy apple aphids and thrips, and my personal nemeses, the coddling moth and apple maggot of wormy-apple fame.
Squirrels and robins bite holes in any apple that manages to reach maturity otherwise unscathed. Hail ensures that most of my apples are pre-dinged regardless of who else has decided to make holes in any apples that season. Late frost is my worst enemy. Frozen flowers do not produce fruit.
Should the flowers on my tree survive this year’s weird spring weather, coddling moths and apple maggots have got to go. Although I don’t use insecticides, I still have lots of options. It’s the kids of these pests that do the damage but good control necessitates going after all life stages. My first line of defense is traps and lures. I plan to hang a pheromone trap in the tree to catch as many of the adults as possible. These traps capture male moths only, so I’m also setting out low-tech capture devices — 1 gallon milk jugs baited with molasses (mixed one tablespoon molasses to 10 parts water). To catch larvae that crawl down the tree, I am applying a band of Tangle-Trap to the trunk.
Apple maggots are getting the “false red apple coated with sticky stuff” treatment, in addition to a few yellow sticky cards for good measure. On a few apples I am going to experiment with the Ziploc plastic bag method (with bottom corners snipped to let moisture out), one bag over each fruit, to foil squirrels and birds.
Experience has made me skeptical, but maybe, just maybe, this year I’ll get enough McIntosh apples to make all of this — not to mention the $20 spent on traps and such — worth the trouble.
Garden writer and lecturer Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West,” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at rltaurora@aol.com.
