Your Classic Apple Orchard

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Several types of leaf rollers, hidden under leaves that they plaster against the fruit, can chew shallow holes in apples. The two ryania or phosmet applications for codling moth control the overwintering worms. Later in the season, in a small home orchard, simply look for leaves covering apples, and squash the worms. In larger orchards, monitor leaf rollers with pheromone traps, and spray with Bt if you catch more than to moths per trap per week. Mating disruption of leaf rollers works well in orchards of five acres or larger.

Plum curculio can scar apples east of the Rockies, but is easily controlled by the two phosmet applications used against the codling moth. Ryania and other organic sprays are not effective against curculio, but damage can be reduced by thinning fruit carefully and raking up thinned and dropped fruit. And though this long-snouted beetle destroys peaches, plums and other stone fruits—where the legless worms burrow through the soft flesh—it often causes only minor scars on apples, whose hard flesh crushes and kills the developing worms. Plant-bug damage to the fruit is often minor too, but if these are numerous, capture them with sticky white rectangle traps hung in trees before bloom.

Another pest in the northeastern quarter of the United States—which thankfully doesn't occur here in Kansas or most of the rest of the country—is apple maggot. This legless worm tunnels throughout the fruit, earning it the nickname "railroad worm." Lowspray growers in New England have prevented damage by hanging sticky red balls, which attract and trap the adult flies, in their trees. But in Michigan, these traps have worked only as a method of timing sprays, such as rotenone, against apple maggot. Mass-trapping attempts in Michigan have resulted in 100% maggot-infested fruit.

If aphids, mites or scale are a problem, a superior-grade oil spray just before budbreak will control these insects. We've never needed to apply this spray because these pests are controlled mostly by naturally-occurring predators in our lowspray orchard. We do see some aphids on branch tips in early summer, but we remove these tips anyway when we prune in June, and simply squash the aphids underfoot before carting away the prunings.

PREVENTING DISEASES

The key to apple-disease prevention is to choose varieties that resist the worst diseases of your area. It's also important to choose a site with good air movement, and maintain scrupulous orchard sanitation. Thin the fruit adequately, and remove all mummified fruit that rotted the previous year and dropped to the ground or is still hanging on the tree. Keep the trees well-pruned and open to air currents. Prune out dead, damaged or diseased wood—from your other trees and shrubs as well as your apples—whenever you see it, and remove all prunings and fallen branches from your property, or chop them up finely with a flail mower. Several fungi that cause fruit rots on apples are primarily colonizers of dead branches in trees or on the ground, and spread from the dead wood to nearly ripe fruit.

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