Tag: Personal

For the past five years I have been attempting to grow apples in my yard. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much success.

Who would have thought that growing an apple would be so damn difficult ?

I figured I’d just drive down to the tree nursery, pick up a few apple trees, dig a few holes, drop the trees into the holes, water and wait for apples to grow…

My first year, I planted my trees, 3 or 4 if I recall correctly. Within two weeks of planting, half of the leaves had been eaten by winter moth caterpillars. I couldn’t believe it. Where the hell did they come from ? Literally, one day the new trees were looking good and then before I knew it they were half dead. Needless to say, my crop of apples may have reached a grand total of 5.

Over the next 4-5 years, if it wasn’t one thing it was another… winter moths, gypsy moths, Japanese beetles, rot, and/or warm weather in late winter followed by a cold snap causing the trees to bud then freeze (resulting in no buds at all)… my best crop for apples over that entire time span has been about 8. And, I lost a couple of trees completely due to them not being able to recover from the insects feasting on them.

BUT ! There is always hope !

This year, the weather has cooperated very nicely and I was able to keep the winter moth caterpillar population under control (at least as of this date 4/30/2017). Hopefully, they don’t all of a sudden appear out of nowhere again.

All 6 of my apple trees, and both peach trees, are flowering nicely right now ! Each tree looks better than it ever has before.

Here are some pictures from April 23rd… the trees are just starting leaf out and bud.

 

And here are the same trees just one week later… still looking good and flowering nicely…

 

Will post more updates as things change… hopefully the locust swarm isn’t heading this way this year 🙂