Dormant Spray For Low-Chill Apple Trees

When it comes to sub-tropical, low-chill varieties of apple trees, it’s a challenge to decide what to do. Based on my own experience, personally, I think the safest way is to sacrifice all fruit and leaves and prune and dormant spray as per usual, but friends of mine have taken a different tack. Whatever you do, don’t leave the fruit, flowers, or leaves on the tree while using dormant spray. You must remove all immature fruit, foliage, and flowers prior to spraying. Perhaps you can wait a little longer, until after Christmas for example, so that some of the fruit can mature well enough to be used for apple sauce or pies?

My experience through the years with these two varieties, ‘Dorset’ and ‘Anna’, is that they often begin flowering in January, so you’d better prune prior to then, say in the last week between Christmas and New Years. Cutting off flowers often stimulates apple trees to pop on some more, so if you have to clip off a few blooms even in December, it won’t be the end of the world. The tree will probably bounce back into bloom. If you see buds, that’s the time to give the tree a light feeding with organic fertilizer and then you should have the tree going in schedule, but two crops a year with ‘Anna’ is a frequent occurrence. A dear friend of mine, now gardening in heaven, Chuck Kline the late horticulturist of Sea World, had a small ‘Anna’ apple tree. He and his wife Lois loved it dearly. Chuck gave up dormant spray, got two crops a year, fertilized and shaped and cleaned the tree by hand, year round, as if it were a special child, picking off caterpillars and using horticultural soaps in a small hand sprayer whenever necessary.

In the past I have always recommended clipping off the leaves and dormant spraying in winter, but I’ve had years when Anna flowered and fruited prior to the holidays and then, like you, I didn’t know what to do. This happened for several years so I just gave up on dormant spray and winter pruning beyond shaping and removing any dead growth, and eventually the tree became diseased and died. Obviously, I wasn’t as faithful as Chuck about keeping my tree totally clean year round. This proved to me that dormant spray really does stop a great many disease and pest problems in their tracks, but Chuck’s system worked too, though it was more time consuming. But when you faithfully follow a program of annual winter pruning for all your deciduous fruit trees, including defoliation if necessary and following up with dormant sprays then bugs and diseases just can’t get a foothold. My Dorset tree is still going strong. It’s more rugged or in a better spot. Both of these trees were old espaliers growing in a spot that eventually became a mixed hedge.

And yes, with peach trees dormant spray is even more important. Be sure to strip off all the leaves and then use the dormant spray against peach leaf curl. Peaches are the first to decline and die when this step is neglected. Also, peach trees need more winter pruning than other deciduous trees in order to create more blooming wood.

Thanks for asking about my health. I am now in great shape again, even better than before the operation, still taking Physical Therapy but making great strides in strength and movement. Currently into a big garden remodel due to some fences collapsing and needing replacement along with repairing old retaining walls and building some new ones. The result is—Voila!—more usable space I never realized I had.