Organic apple pest and disease control
To
hear Michael Phillips write about it, you would think that apple trees
are fortunate to make it through the year, let alone set fruit.
He
fights a slew of insect pests along with fungal, bacterial, and viral
diseases, struggling to end up with a harvest of fruits pretty enough
to sell to his customers.
I feel lucky to be a
homesteader who cares mostly about taste. Still, I plan to take
some of his preventative advice to heart. We're slowly cutting
down nearby cedar trees and would do the same if we had nearby
crabapples or hawthorns since all three serve as alternate hosts for
apple diseases.
Once our trees are
bearing, we'll rake up their leaves in the fall and compost them since
fallen apple trees can innoculate the tree with diseases the next year
if left in place. While thinning our hypothetical fruits, we'll
be careful to remove insect-damaged apples and will also rake up
June-dropped fruits to feed to our chickens. Old timey apple
farmers used to run poultry and swine under their trees during that
period --- maybe we'll have pigs
by then and can work something out.
For now, though, we're
in that golden period before the apple trees mature when we can
fantasize that our fruits won't fall prey to any diseases or
pests. I'll dream while I can, and remember The
Apple Grower for
organic tips when the time comes.
| This post is part of our Growing Organic Apples lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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