RX for Neglected Apple Trees

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3. Waiting. Next spring, plug all the holes where rot had been removed with cement patches, scrape the branches till each takes on a pink, youthful glow, douse each tree well with a miscible oil (a pure, harmless mineral oil that will dissolve in water), spray, cross your fingers, and sit back to see what will happen.

Such severe pruning can throw even young healthy trees out of bearing, so don't expect much the first year. The trees may flower sparsely, leafed out only at their tip ends, and seem determined to spend the year making suckers. Each of these long, shiny whips should be snipped off as it appears. You should cut a sucker off flush with trunk or branch to prevent regrowth, but need to leave a fraction of an inch of the limb base or branch so it can grow a ring of necessary scar tissue. The trees will seem to sulk through the summer. Don't be discouraged if several just give up, particularly if your autumns tend to be dry. Old trees demand such a drastic "cure," though at times too much wood is removed and the trees can't produce enough leaves to feed their trunk and root systems.

4. Protecting. Trees that make it through the fall and winter, though, begin to perk up. But they still need help avoiding small marauders. Thanks in part perhaps to the titanic overspraying of orchard trees with powerful insecticides, the natural balance of insect predators seems to be indefinitely out of whack. You cannot grow an apple anymore without some kind of special pest control measures. I treat mine not only with twice yearly sprayings of miscible oil (once in spring just as the buds begin to swell, another just after they have cracked open but before the petals have popped out), but I follow the oil on the second go-round with a spray of wettable sulfur and rotenone. Then when the petals fall off, I spray again with the sulfur, rotenone, and Ryania, another natural insect repellent. You can repeat the three-part spray ever two weeks or after every hard rain if you wish; the more spray, the more supermarket-perfect will be the fruit.

Some purists might even object to this amount of spraying, but all the components are harmless to humans. The oil will kill over-wintering eggs of many bugs, scale in particular. The sulfur keeps down several fungus diseases and combines with the oil to kill off mites that can ruin developing buds. Rotenone and Ryania are effective against just about any bug that chews plants, but it doesn't harm most natural predators. I found that the sprayings keep down aphids long enough for the young fruit nubbins to develop to large enough size that the aphid's bite won't ruin the fruit. By then the natural wasp parasite and ladybird population should keep the bugs in check. The Ryania is particularly effective against the first generation of another immigrant pest, the codling moth. Tenacious and seemingly invincible to a variety of pesticides within a few years of spraying, the moth larvae are, nevertheless, put off by Ryania before they can burrow into the young fruit. You can obtain these natural insecticides in individual containers and in wettable-powder mixes through most mail-order seed and nursery catalogs.

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