We’ve got 3 yellow apple trees (I think they’re Golden Delicious, but not sure), 2 red apple trees (variety unknown), and 2 pear trees of two different types….
The pears are fine, normal fruit, normal looking trees.
The red apple trees also look good.
The yellow apples….not so much. The tree furthest from the house is also the one lowest (elevation wise) by a couple feet. That one never even bloomed. We blamed that on the weird frosts we got in the spring, but its just continues to look sickly, and I’m not actually sure it even formed buds in the first place….leaves are yellow, and the tree just looks “bleh” (I know, such a descriptor huh?). I tried to get a picture, but in every picture I took the tree actually looked pretty good. Oh well.
The other two yellow apple trees are a couple feet higher up, both have fruit, and one has a HUGE amount of fruit. But both are drooping badly, dropping LARGE numbers of their fruit already, have yellow leaves, and the larger of the two has several dying branches…..
We do have an insect problem, but we always have, and it doesn’t look any worse this year than normal. And the trunk and bark doesn’t look damaged in anyway.
I bought some fruit tree fertilizer, and put it down for all the trees, but I’m wondering if the insane rains we had are the problem. Doing some research it DOES look like its possible for an apple tree’s roots to get so wet that they just rot out from under the tree…..
Many years ago we lost some of our mature (15 year old) fruit trees to ants. Yes, ants. They dug out tunnels and nests around the roots, and found any crack in the bark to tunnel in for sap. The trees were weeping sap (I assume the ants were planting some sort of aphids there ) and the ant had highways going up and down the trees. That is why we finally got rid of the fruit trees and I planted other stuff that isn’e so attractive to them (the ants are still around, and do kill other plants occasionally).
Weird, but true (and ignore anyone that says ants don’t kill plants – they know not of which they talk about)
Hm, well, they’re not weeping sap either, but I can see ants being a problem, regardless of what “they” may say!
The good news is that we noticed this last week that two of them look perkier than they have all summer….not sure if its the fertlizer I put down or the fact that things have finally dried out, but cross your fingers!