 Let's wrap up tonight with a talk about growing apples, which is the most popular tree fruit in North Dakota. I have the honor of giving this talk. My name is Tom Colb. I'm at North Dakota State University and I was raised on a farm in Minnesota that commercially grew apples near the Twin Cities by the Arboretum area and by that major apple research area. In my work at NDSU, I do conducting workshops, I write articles, I answer lots of gardening questions, and I coordinate like the spring fever garden forums like we are tonight and the North Dakota Home Garden variety trials and the North Dakota Junior Master Gardener Program. So I'm going to share my screen and get us going right away here. I like to have interaction and some fun in my presentations as much as possible as much as this zoom thing will allow. How about I just we're going to talk about growing apples, but what is your favorite tree fruit? Is it pears? Is it apples? What's your favorite tree fruit? Does anybody want to go in the chat box and tell me what's our favorite fruit they like to eat that grows on a tree? Okay, I love it. Apples, cherries, apples, apples, apricots, love it. Okay, these are all figs, June... Okay, here we go. Now we're talking. How come nobody said bananas? How come that? There you go. Look at all those lot of cherries and plums. Surprised about that. I used to live in Asia for seven years. I had lemons, limes, oranges, I had a banana tree. Man, when you harvest a bunch of bananas, you don't pick one off at a time. It's like a whole bunch of like 200 bananas all right. So you think zucchini is hard to get rid of in North Dakota? Try getting rid of a gigantic bunch of bananas. Yeah, it's quite the task. And I'll tell you about one of my favorite fruits. Let me click it here. And that's a peach tree. I've worked in extension a lot of years and I always put in demonstration orchards whether it was in Wisconsin or here even in Bismarck. And I always like to show people what works like apples and pears just like Kathy does. And then I also like to show people what doesn't work and that's peaches for example. My county people here have a peach tree that's doing well. I don't think many people are, but I'll never forget the time when I was in Wisconsin and I was walking through my orchard, my demonstration orchard all blown on a Sunday afternoon. And all of a sudden right before my eyes was a peach that was perfectly ripe, just ready to be picked. And so what am I gonna do with that? You know, I'm all by myself. There's nobody around to give it to. So I said, I'm gonna eat it. And so I grabbed it and it was a best tasting fruit I ever had. I loved it. I fell in love with that peach tree. But then what happens? Death, death the next winter. But I still love that tree. So I said, I'm gonna try it again. I did the same thing. And then what happened? Same thing. After three years I get a couple fruits and this time death. I still love that tree. I still love peach trees. And I planted one here in Bismarck at an orchard, your demonstration orchard, death. So looking back, do I regret falling in love with peaches and watching them die? No, I don't regret because it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so I do think it's okay to take a few chances but may I recommend that apples won't break your heart. And I'm from an apple orchard and you can have great time picking apples with your kids and the apples taste good to almost as good as a peach. As a picture of my family and my family's orchard and there's my wife, my two oldest kids. And every fall I go home to help pick the 350 apple trees we got and my mom would thank me for all the hard work. And I would just tell my mom, I wanna thank you because this is such a glorious thing to be here picking fruits with my children and my wife and enjoying the fruits and enjoying the cool weather. So I recommend everybody to get out and put in a backyard orchard and put in a few trees including a couple apple trees. And apple trees are beautiful in the springtime. However, I have to say it's not easy to grow apples in North Dakota. We're so proud of ourselves in agriculture. Yes, we are number one in durham wheat. We are number one in canola. We are number one in honey. We are number one in dry beans. Well, how are we doing in apples? And that's our most popular tree food. So how about the 48 contiguous states? Where does North Dakota rank out of 48 states? I think you could probably guess we're 48th, okay? We are last. So it's hard. It's a little bit challenging to grow apples in North Dakota. And so I'm gonna try to help you make it easy. And so first of all, where are you gonna plant your tree? It's gonna have lots of sun. And just like Kathy had her horror story with pears. I've had similar horror stories with like honey crisp apples and watching your crop fall on the ground. So if you can find a place that's a little bit sheltered from the worst winds, it helps. Apples and pears, they have to have a well-drained soil. They can't have wet feet and you gotta avoid the frost. The frost can kill your flowers in the spring. The frost can damage your fruits in the fall. So avoid those low pockets. Where are you gonna buy your plants? I believe you should try to buy from a local nursery or garden center. They buy their materials from the wholesalers, Bailey and Jeffries out of Canada, proven winners. If you wanna buy 50 trees, I think I'd go to Bailey and Twin Cities and ask for their advice. But I'm not here to endorse or discriminate against anybody. I strongly believe in bare root trees. They're much more affordable. And so Jung Seed and Start Brothers have good selections. Kathy mentioned St. Lawrence out in New York. St. Lawrence specializes in cold hardy zone three trees. So that's always an interesting, they have a wide selection. Even those kind of weird funky varieties that Kathy tried. So St. Lawrence has an interesting collection. Know your zone. Zone, most of us live in zone four, where it only gets to be about minus 30 in the winter. Zone four, it's a little harsher. Or zone three, I should say a little harsher. That's like 40 below zero up in zone three. So know your zone. Don't take chances. If you're zone three and it's hardy to zone four, you're gonna lose that tree. Or if you're zone four and you're gonna plant a zone five peach, you're gonna lose it. Mother nature is fierce. She is unforgiving. So don't challenge her. I hold her hand and I walk with her and cooperate with her. It's the way to work. Here's just a few cultivars. And you've got on your handout, you have like 10 steps to growing apples in northern North Dakota. And there's another handout available. 10 steps is growing apples in North Dakota for the more southern area. These are some widely grown apples. I like Zestar is a great early apple in zone four. Maybe up in zone three, I would go with Norland. Duchess, I list here as an heirloom from Russia. That has a good qualities. Prairie magic is an outstanding tree from Canada. Honey crisp is the dominant tree in the Midwest. And that's cause it just tastes unbelievably well. It's crisp and so sweet and delicious. And it stores surprisingly well. It'll store through much of winter for you. But that's a zone four. So I would say try prairie magic in zone three. And Harrelson, Harrelson was the old standard before honey crisp came to town. Harrelson's super easy to grow. It tolerates fire, blight. It's a little bit tart for fresh eating, but otherwise it's a great general purpose apple. And your handouts got more varieties that I recommend. When you buy an apple tree, you see that where that red arrow is, every apple tree you buy is grafted. And you see where it's connected right there. You plant that graft union two inches above the soil line. And you'll notice I put a stake. I always stake every apple tree I ever plant at least for the first few years. Okay, when you look at the rootstocks, there's three major categories. And this will affect the growth and the size of the tree. Almost all the rootstocks in North Dakota are standard and that's North Dakota is a harsh place. It's a tough place. So they give you the toughest, most heartiest rootstock and that's the standard one. But it does not suppress growth. You're gonna get a very tall tree that you have to prune aggressively. Also, standard trees can take a long time to bear fruit. It can be like eight years for you're gonna get a good crop. And that's why most commercial growers in zone four will look towards a semi-dwarf types. They're lower, easier to manage, and they're more precocious. I'm gonna start getting a good crop after four years of a semi-dwarf. There's also got the dwarf types available. I've tried them here in Bismarck. I am not pleased with the performance of the dwarf trees. They just lack vigor. And now do you see how I stake my trees? I stake them in a very simple way. I use a 10-foot electrical conduit pipe, three-quarter inch diameter. Okay, it's a 10-foot long. I pound it two feet in the ground and then I just loosely tie it with some twine. Staking prevents wind damage. It prevents that graft union from snapping apart, okay? Also, stake trees develop stronger root systems. They lead to earlier bearing and they lead to higher yields. So I always stake my trees in the beginning. Malt, you have to mulch your tree and then use the 3-3-3 rule. Malt should be at least three feet wide, three inches thick and you should have no mulch three inches near the trunk because otherwise that will attract voles. Malt will conserve moisture. It'll keep the grass away. It'll keep the lawnmower away, which is a major killer. And mulch keeps the soil insulated. It keeps it a little bit cooler in the summer, a little bit warmer in the winter. And this shredded bark mulch will insulate the soil in the early spring to prevent a quick bloom. I don't want a quick bloom because then I'm gonna get, my blooms are gonna get frost. I want a cool, slow bloom. That's what a cool, slow budding of the flowers, okay? So mulching is critical. You have to make a commitment for the first two years to water your tree on a regular basis. And in general, you put 10 gallons of water per inch of caliper every week per tree. So what's an inch of caliper? For apple trees, we measure the caliper at about ankle height, about six inches high. Most apple trees are about one inch caliper. So that means every tree is gonna get about 10 gallons of water per week if it's dry. Do not irrigate wet soil. If the soil is wet, the tree doesn't need it. And if you irrigate wet soil, what's gonna happen is you're gonna drown those roots. You're gonna close those air pockets and you're gonna cause root rot. So only irrigate if it's dry, which it is most of the time here. There's different ways to irrigate. And though you like these tree gator bags are convenient or you can see on the right, you see these five gallon pails that have holes punched in the bottom or I just use a watering wand and spend my evening watering that way, that's fine. What I wanna highlight to you is this white tube on the side of the tree. And that's, I think that Kathy's a painter. She's artistic, maybe I just not into that. And so I like to use these spiral guard tree guards but they're white in color. And so like Kathy was emphasizing, why do we have white? Because we wanna, why do we wrap a tree? I thought we wrapped a tree to keep it warm in winter but no, we wrap a tree to keep it cool. Keep the bark cool. Keep the bark on that Southwest side, cool to keep it dormant. And that will prevent that the cells from getting active and then sunscalding. And here's a picture at the Bismarck Post Office of a maple tree with sunscalding. Almost every maple and almost every unprotected apple tree will have sunscalding on the Southwest side. It's not a killer. It's just like a, it's just, it stunts the growth. It hurts a little bit of that tree ring where the water and nutrients flow. So that's just protect against sunscal, use white. Don't use like black plastic tubes. That's ridiculous. Go white. These spiral tree guards will also provide some protection against voles. And then what about deer? Oh my gosh. I remember I planted 40 apple trees at United tribes and then I came back a few days later to water them. And I think this was the deer watching me plant those trees. You see, it's just licking its lips there, just waiting for me to leave. Cause it pruned every one of those 40 trees for me after three days. And so what's the best way to deal with deer? This is the way I deal with it. There you go. The lead solution. There you go. But at the United tribes, they didn't want me out there with the rifle shooting deer, makes sense. So then I said the second best solution. And that's exclusion, fencing, an eight foot high electrical fence is the next option. They didn't want that option either. So then I had to use repellent, chemical repellent liquid fence. It is disgusting. It's sulfur, garlic, rotten eggs, probably animal guts all mixed together. It's terrible. And you have to spray it in the beginning about every week. And then I got to like every month and it smells terrible when you do it. And it keeps the spouse away from hugging you. But anyhow, it's helpful. A repellent is not as good as killing it, killing the pest or excluding it. But I had the deer at United tribes grazing around the apple orchard there. Okay, I'm gonna talk about pest management quickly here. The best way you control pests for in a backyard orchard is just rake up the old fruits and the old leaf litter because that's where the insects and diseases harbor. So get a rake out. Okay, now with fungicide, if I'm serious about this and I'm a commercial orchard, I'm spraying my tree like every two weeks to protect against diseases. I have to have perfect apples, but we don't wanna do that in the backyard. Nobody wants to spend every other week out there spraying with poison as chemicals. So choose the key times. And the most important time to protect against diseases is in early spring. When the leaves are just popping up, they don't have any waxy protection on them yet. Okay, so a spray like right before, like a day or two before the rain comes, that that will be that fungicide will be a shield of protection to protect my leaves. In insects, and there's, I like to start with traps and here's our most common pest, the apple maggot fly. And she's a late sleeper. She wakes up in late June along the fireworks is when she wakes up and then she wants to lay her eggs. And she looks for apples to puncture and the maggots hatch and they make these trails. You can't even see the maggots. They're very tiny and translucent, but they're there, they do the damage. So what I like to do is hang up these apple traps for like five in a trap, there's like these red balls like a Christmas ornament. You put sticky coating on them. And then I just go out there every week starting in late June to see if there's any maggot flies. If there's no maggot flies, then I'm gonna have to spray my tree. But if there are maggot flies, I'm gonna have to make a decision. The other pest, then second most part one in North Dakota is the codling moth. This is the classic worm in your apple and the rotten core. So, and you know, there's only one thing worse than finding a worm when you bite into an apple, right? There's only one thing worse than that. And that's finding a half a worm when you bite into an apple. So how do we prevent a codling moth? The time to spray for codling moth is right after the petals fall. So one or two sprays right then is a great time to do it. We can monitor for codling moths too. And so how do we attack any enemy? You find their weakness. And what is the weakness of a lot of insects? I tell you their weakness is they love sex. They gotta have it. And like, when you're an adult, especially an adult male, all you think about is having sex. You don't even eat that much anymore. And so what we do, the scientists, they develop a chemical pheromone that mimics a female who's receptive. So that male moth flies around that trap you see in the corner picture there and he senses a female's receptive. So he goes right into that trap thinking he's gonna get some action. What does he get? He gets a sticky carpet and all he does is he sticks there and dies sitting next to a bunch of horny men. Just worst possible way to go, I gotta think. But that's what we gotta do to fight these codling moths. But these are monitoring devices. They're not gonna provide pure control. That's why it helps you determine should I spray or not? Use their weaknesses. Lastly, I'm gonna talk about pruning. They're prune every winter, like March and April. Don't make excuses. It's easy. People worry, oh, I don't know what to prune. That's no excuse. Almost all pruning is mindless. My 11-year-old can do it, okay? He does it. You wanna get lots of sun and wind movement through the tree. That's what it's all about. I just wanna open up windows. I wanna get rid of that clutter. I wanna keep the height manageable. I don't wanna tree taller than, I don't wanna taller than 12 feet tall. I don't wanna be going on high ladders to pick apples. I wanna keep that tree down. So why do we do it in March and April? We can easily see the limbs, the trees dormant, and so we won't spread like fire blight or other diseases when we prune in March or April. However, this is the typical apple tree in North Dakota. Never pruned. No wonder we're 48th. I can't go into details about how to train and prune apple trees. I'm gonna cover the basics here, but I highly recommend, I love this series of publications about growing apples in Wisconsin. There's one about growing pears in Wisconsin. There's one about growing cherries in Wisconsin. It's full of lots of good drawings and information. And if you're serious about this fruit, I recommend you download this free publication and check it out. I'm gonna give you just a primer, the basics of pruning. Okay, there's two types of major buds. The flower buds are big and fuzzy. That's what I want. The leaf buds are glossy and skinny. I don't want shade. I don't plant my apple tree for shade. I don't care about leaf buds. So even if you can see on this picture that the branch is trimming off, it's just full of, it's an upright branch, like Kathy said, upright branches do not produce fruit. They just produce leaves and I don't want that. So vertical branches are unfruitful and the crotches are weak. Horizontal branches are very fruitful, but they're weak too, because they can't hold the weight until the branches collapse. So I always tell it, 60 degrees is a good way. Or Kathy says 45. You get the ballpark in intermediate ways go because you'll have fruitful branches and strong crotches that can support the fruit. Okay, here's, go over this quickly. I want to remove the suckers at the base. They do nothing for my tree. I want to get rid of those vertical water sprouts. See, this is not, I'm not even thinking. I'm not even thinking. If it's vertical, I'm taking it out. Here it is with my locking shears. If it's a thick one, I'm taking it out. Not thinking, I'm not thinking. It's not brain surgery. It's not open heart surgery. If it's vertical, it's coming out. If it's going in, it's coming out. Because then it's gonna cross branches, have, create diseases. It's gonna clutter up the tree. I want my tree to grow outward, get more sun. Okay, let's go over this diagrammatically and this is in your handout. So we're gonna remove the suckers, get rid of those vertical water sprouts. And then as we go around here, let me get this planter going here. Here we go, let's just keep going around here. I'm gonna head back to long branches. I want like a pure middle shape trained if possible in the guinea, especially the youthful time of the tree. And so I don't wanna shade the lower branches. So I'll head it back and where I head it is towards an outward facing bud. I want this branch to grow out. Okay, next, again, vertical branches out. I wanna keep my tree at a certain low height. So tall branches are coming out. Those inward crossing branches, they're coming out. And those horizontal branches, they're coming out. Okay, so this really is not rocket science. I love this photo. I love this diagram. It shows the clutter you have before and how nice it is when you're done. It's just like a nice haircut. You feel so good afterwards. And that's the way this tree feels. In general, for the apple trees, I think that if you're not sure you're done to me, that means you're not done. That means you should keep going at it and get rid of that clutter. Okay, and my dad taught me you should have like a hub with spokes coming out of it. That's what he was taught me. But get rid of that clutter. Here's a couple other ways to look at it. Somebody taught me that your apple tree should be so open it should have so many windows through that tree that a robin should be able to fly through that tree in the springtime. Here's another one, an old guy from Wisconsin taught me. He says, Tom, you should be able to pick up an old, rangy farm cat and you should be able to throw it through the tree. If the cat gets stuck, they gotta keep pruning. There he goes. But I have to say for the record, I do not recommend throwing cats in trees, right? So you can break a lot of branches doing that. So don't do that. Got it? Lastly, what about your old tree? I told you on Cathy's presentation, old trees, apple trees are like people. They can live to a hundred, but when they hit 40, they start going downhill. So you got to have realistic expectations with an old apple tree. But the principles are the same. I want to get rid of those water sprouts, get rid of those inward crossing branches, but also I'll take the dead wood out. Also with the old tree, I need to bring it down. I need to bring it down. And maybe the first year, that's all I'm going to do primary. Get rid of the dead wood and bring it down. And so this is going to take a few years to reshape an old tree. It hasn't been taken care of for many years. It's going to take a few years to get it in shape. And then at the end, it's going to have this nice look. It's going to look like an old umbrella. That's the way. And it's still very manageable. So that's my presentation. I want to thank, give credit to the photographers and also wish you a happy spring if it ever comes. And we do got 10 minutes for questions. I'd welcome any questions that anybody might have. And I will go to the question and answers and I will answer them myself, it looks like. Here we go. Apple tree dive, it has a nice runner. It's probably a sucker branch. Can you let it grow and would it produce eventually? If it's a sucker, it's probably coming from the rootstock. And the rootstock is probably a low quality Russian apple or perhaps a doggo crab. So it will produce fruits eventually but you're going to get a low quality fruit. So I would not try to rescue a sucker. I would just get rid of it and start all over. I've heard the rule of mulch should be five inches diameter and five inches deep. Five inches I think is a little bit deep. Mulch five feet diameter wide. You know what? It should be 50 diameter, you know, the more the better but at least three. But I like five, Don. I like five too. Yeah, just that mulch is wonderful. This person has a young apple tree that planted last year. The white tube is placed around the tree and deer prune the top of the white tube. Will it survive? Yes. So the deer cut right above the white tube. So what he ended up creating was a whip, we call it. And actually commercial orchards, we start with whips. So if this guy's got nothing happening, if there's like no branching, actually I'd probably make the first cut at about three feet tall and wherever you make a cut, you'll get new branches form. So then my first scaffold will be at three feet high. That's what I would do. But that tree will survive. And then get that shotgun out next time or repellent. Should we cut the top of the tree of an apple? If it's, yes, you should cut the top of the tree. I don't know how you can manage a 25 foot tall tree. I don't know how you can spray it. I don't know how you can harvest it. I mean, when I see trees like that, people just shake them and then the apples drop and then they pick them up. That's just not the way to produce a quality apple. So cut it back. God, I think it should be no more than 15 feet and I would go smaller. How do I protect trees from wasp? Generally, if my experience is wasp like fruits that are already wounded, so just avoid picking or avoid picking, be careful about the wounded apples but also pick up the fruit litter if it falls down. And so that way it will draw the wasp away. So just and be careful because the wasps are aggressive in the fall. Can I powered an old tree? If that's like grafting, yes, you can, definitely. Is a tree ever too young to be pruned? No, a tree should be pruned every day until the last year of its life. What causes sections in the apple tree to get a web looking wrap in it? Okay, that webby wrap is a tent caterpillar. Tent caterpillars love fruit trees and they'll go in there in the springtime, they'll make a web and then they'll come out and they'll eat the leaves. Tent caterpillars are usually not killers, they're just do some early defoliation. So you can use a jet spray of water, you can hit them with one of those insecticides I showed before, like malathion would take it out or a spinosad or a pyrethrin, spray directly into the nest. Or in some cases you just get a twig and scoop out the tent caterpillar. Or sometimes a jet spray of water would just knock it out. Will the PowerPoint presentations be available to watch again? Wow, you want an on-court performance? Definitely, all our presentations are available on the Spring Fever website. For 10 years we've been doing this, every presentation is on the Spring Fever website and I got to thank Scott and Sonia for producing them and then posting them on our website. So like two or three days after today, you can tell your friends to watch this presentation. Or if I talk too fast, I'm sorry, you can watch it again or if you see it like maybe we had some great talks tonight and so you go see April's and Tafi's again. You have an apple tree, it's 10 years old and right after they planted it, a deer tore off the main center branch. The tree still hasn't produced any fruits. It's 10 years old, it hasn't produced fruits. It's time for it to produce fruits. So then the first thing, is it blooming? It's gotta bloom, make sure it's blooming. If it's blooming and not producing fruits, it's not getting fertilized by bees or pollinated slash fertilized. So then I need to have another apple or crab apple tree within 100 yards for sure and 100 feet's better. Otherwise it could be a lot of, maybe you're using insecticides and killing bees off, but if it's not blooming, then maybe you're over fertilizing or the tree's in too much shade. So if you love your apple tree, that means you're gonna cut down your nearby ash tree and have a better orchard, how about that? This guy's got a 40 year old tree with no mulch and it cross pollinates with a neighbor tree. Would it pay to mulch the old tree? Yes, you should mulch every tree in North Dakota and with shredded bark mulching, never rock. I shouldn't prune more than 20% of a tree every year. That's a general rule of thumb. And you know, there's some validity to that. And that's why if you've got a big overgrown tree, it's gonna take like three years to get it in shape because you can't do all that aggressive pruning one time because that will stimulate a ton of water sprouts. So that's why I get to the point again, you gotta prune every year. So if you prune every year, you're not gonna be taking off more than 20% of the tree's overall wood at any one year. So prune on a regular basis in March or April while the tree's dormant. Let's see what else we got. Has attacked the leaves of the apple tree. It's got holes in its leaves. That's a leaf roller or some type of caterpillar. I don't care about that because the tree doesn't care about it. Because if you step back and you look at that tree, that tree is still green. It's got tons of leaves. So who cares if a caterpillar eats 2% of its leaf tissue? Okay, don't lose any sleep over it. The apple tree has survived for years without spraying insecticides. Don't worry about it. Okay, you've got other things to worry about in your life than a past eating a few apple leaves. Are apple trees tolerant of clay soils? Yes, but it won't tolerate a wet soil. Okay, so it's gotta have good drainage. This person says, should they amend the soil for better success? You know what? Yeah, but the roots go out like forever. So you can't amend the whole orchard. So, and even if you just put it in the planting hole, that amendment, that peat moss, whatever, then the roots are gonna like it so much there. They're never gonna go into the native soil. So the whole key is, just pick a good site to begin with and let the tree cope with the native soil. They make a chemical that kills off suckers. Is that harmful to the tree? Yeah, that's a sucker guard, like sucker stopper. That's a growth hormone, a growth regulator, a plant growth regulator. Is that harmful to the tree? If it's applied properly, it's not harmful to the tree, but can I just say, it's like I showed you. My young Kevin can prune out suckers. It's mindless. You just get a lopping shears. It's March or April. You prune out the daughter in suckers. Don't have to buy those chemicals. Have I ever used spray and grow? No, I don't know what that is. Sorry. Should you mulch an old tree? Yes, you should mulch a tree until the day it dies. Where do you buy a good Beirut Prairie Magic apple tree? Where you buy it? I can't endorse a company, it's not fair. I can't pick one. Lots of companies, Northern companies sell Prairie Magic. And so all you gotta do is go to Google, type in Prairie Magic Beirut tree. They'll get like five nurseries pop up just like that. Every variety that I talked about tonight is well, it's lots of nurseries have it. I didn't pick a weird variety. They let the grass grow around the apple tree after three or four years old. Can they take the sod off now? Yes, you should take the sod off this spring. Excuse me. And replace it with mulch. No, you should take the sod off or I know people think roundup is evil. You can spray it with roundup or glyphosate in a three foot, three to five foot ring and that will kill the grass, roots and all. And then you put shredded bark over that dead area. How do you manage gulls? Gulls on a bark. I don't really ever step in a major problem with apples. So how do I control fire blight? To fight it's a whole talk about fire blight. Fire blight is a killer. And I would just say, if you wanna learn about fire blight get to know about the ugly stub treatment. What we do is we see the branch, it's got the fire blight. It's a killer of apples and pears. There's no way to spray it out of the tree. We gotta amputate it. Just like a Civil War soldier's leg. Gotta amputate it. Go about at least eight inches and we're like two feet from where you see the blight. It's like a torch, a fire torch with a shepherd's crook. And then I would prune it back to an ugly stub. At least a four inch stub that's two years or older wood. And then if I didn't get all the fire blight it would generally stay in that stub until winter and then I cut the stub out in winter. Get to know the ugly stub treatment. Should you avoid planting apples near evergreens? No, don't worry about that. You're worried about cedar apple rust. I think you're worried about it. But cedar apple rust is not a killer of apple trees. And the evergreens can help provide great wind protection from you. So as long as the evergreens are not shading my tree I love planting near evergreens. Okay, I think a lot of, what's a good yellow apple? That's a good one. My favorite is honey gold. Wood ars is a North Dakota apple. It's supposed to be the sweetest of all, but it's late. Maybe something like a low dye is an early spring yellow apple. When I say shredded bark is that the same stuff you can buy at a box store? Yes. How long should you keep the tree garden to prevent bunnies? As long as you can and try to control the bunnies is basically like keep the grass mowed nearby so the bunnies have less habitat and then the hawks will take care of them. And then as far as about the tree tubes should you remove the tree tubes during the summertime, for example? Yes, because they protect primarily in sunscald and as soon as the leaves coming out that means that the bark gets shaded and also we don't have frost injury then. So as soon as the frost gets over, I was taught that when the months have an R in it it should have a tree guard. So that means in May we can take our tree guard off. May, June, July, August and then September it comes back on. Okay, there you go. I think I wanna stay on time and I wanna thank you all tonight. We had a really had a fun session with everybody here tonight and we'll do it again next week. Next week we're gonna talk about biotechnology or biology and technology. We're gonna learn how to monitor the monarchs in our gardens. There's some new plant identification apps and also any issues developed seem some mulches that are biodegradable and sprayable. So we're gonna be looking at that research. So I'll please join us next week. Everybody have a good night and thanks for joining us tonight.