Building the 2006 Ontario Apple Crop

After a really mild and temperate winter, apple trees emerged from dormancy earlier than average for much of Ontario. This meant, as all fruit growers know, that there was a good probability of running into frost issues around bloom this past spring. This of course did happen in some areas. There are in reality very few years when we do not see frost problems in the crop somewhere. Suffice it to say it still amazes me how well some trees and blocks emerge from these events with a pretty good looking crop under the care of a watchful orchardist.

Since those frosty nights way back in April while trees were in the prebloom stage of growth we have seen variable pollination conditions, too much scab in McIntosh for some, pretty good rainfall, hail, and more winter injury showing up from a couple of years ago. The scab issue is one that puzzles me – in spite of perfectly adequate preparations and programs by conscientious growers, McIntosh remains one of the most susceptible to this disease.

I wonder if growers that sprayed in the rain this spring got away with less infection pressure from scab on sensitive cultivars like McIntosh. We had periods of very dry weather in the spring along with periods of tough rainy and windy conditions that lasted for a few days.

The new factsheet on Apogee is now available for anyone interested. I have seen some excellent results from the use of this product in various orchards from a 2-spray program. Cultivars like Northern Spy and Cortland do not look in any way similar to untreated trees from a canopy development point of view. Spy has always been a costly cultivar to manage because of its growth habit. Other varieties like Gingergold are equally endowed with liberal supplies of natural gibberellins that make their canopy growth almost impossible to deal with. We do have some evidence of cracking of maturing Empire fruitlets in Ontario this year.

I can remember sitting in meetings in Michigan several years ago listening to researchers describe this same cracking problem on Empire in Michigan. Although research in Ontario at the University of Guelph had never revealed this problem, the issue is talked about in our factsheet and on the label as a caution. New York has also experienced the same condition in Empire. Empire appears to require a certain flow of gibberellins that is somewhat different than other cultivars in the early cell division stages of growth. This appears to enable the expansion of cells in the skin of the fruit and in the flesh to progress in an uninhibited fashion. This is probably intimately related to weather events and fruitlet growth rates.

There is lots of growing season remaining at the time of writing this article. Once again growers do have an opportunity to see controlled experiments and trials set out across the Province in different areas comparing treatments on a cultivar-by-cultivar or block-by-block basis. As long as growers are willing to experiment and use new products and processes, then we can expect the look and state of the art of modern apple orcharding to keep evolving.