 Hi, hi Tom. Hi everyone. I'm glad to be here tonight. Yeah, I've already been pruning and it's hopefully going to be a great year in the orchard, we will see. And yeah, we're going to talk about apples tonight. I'm not going to tell you anything specifically really about diseases because I have to say we don't have any diseases in our apples at the research center, so I'm not really up on them. So we'll have to depend on someone else for our answers. Someone else like Tom Kolb. So this is where Carrington is, most of you will probably know. We are in the center area of North Dakota East Central. We're in some very nice property there, nice loam soil, not many rocks and not too salty, which is really nice. This is a picture of our orchard. The orchard area is an enclosed area. It's about six acres in total, but three acres are what the orchard encompasses. We've got lots of different stuff like Tom said. We've got grapes and plums and apples. Those were some of the early crops that were put in in 2006. And then the next year in 2007, we got a lot more things. Hascaps, currants, june berries. We have cherries, hardy cherries from Canada, hazelnuts, aronia berries. We've had a few elderberries over the years and pears. We put the pears in in 2015. They're kind of new for us, so we're seeing how they're doing. So this is our apple planting. They're spaced about 15 feet by 20 feet. All of our apples are standard-sized apples. I have to ask someone, does this text look weird? It looks smooshed on my screen. I'm not sure how it looks for you guys. Yeah, Kathy, it didn't convert quite right. Shoot. Well, I think we can read it. The most important part is the picture, I would say. So I would probably suggest the apple planting of a standard-sized tree, maybe being on that 20-foot by 20-foot spacing. We were trying to save a little room because we had some permanent trees that our director wanted to keep and I kind of had to get them fit in there. So some of them touch already, from side to side. They do touch, but a 20 by 20-foot would probably give you more room for them to grow. So we have the hazelnut apple, we have herald red, honey crisp, sweet 16, and zestar as our choices. We have 22 trees altogether. We have four trees each of five varieties. And then we have two extra honey crisps. The person who was buying them couldn't resist a few extra honey crisps. And I already said they're standard trees. And in this picture on the right, this is how they looked in 2006, just nice tiny little trees. Probably about two years old, maybe three years old when they came from the nursery. They were bare root. We really suggest a bare root tree, they will just do well in your landscape. They can put their own, their roots can find their own way in the soil and they'll be pretty happy. So I just want to comment on this, that all trees kind of, they have their own way of growing just like every different person does. This is a hazelnut tree and it's a natural semi-dwarf tree. And look at how it grows, it's kind of funny. It'll grow upward and then it grows and curves over, curves downward. You know, this was the most vigorous tree we had in the spring. And then about the fifth year, all of a sudden the leaders just started tipping over on this variety. So they kind of limited themselves and we've just been managing them ever since. And all of them kind of look like this. And then I want to show you the next extreme. Hazelnut is very nice to take care of because it doesn't get very tall. Here's the other extreme. This is Sweet 16. I see it makes me nuts. It looks so upright, it's growing. I might talk about that later, but it grows so vigorously and so upright. It's very, very hard to keep it under control. It doesn't want to produce a lot of fruit because vertical shoots don't like to produce fruit. It's the horizontal shoots that like to produce fruit. So yeah, some of these trees were 10 years old or 9 years old before they actually started to produce fruit. And I've heard this from several people who also have Sweet 16s, just people in North Dakota that their trees also took 10 years to bear fruit. So we can talk about how to fix that, I think. So the main portion of my work with the apples is really the pruning. I start pruning. I've already started pruning for the year, but I start pruning as soon as possible. I will start when there's still snow out. Like, the year this picture was taken, I think I just put my snow shoes on and went out there. Because you know, spring all of a sudden comes along quite quickly in North Dakota. It can be cold and then all of a sudden it's 65 or 70, especially when spring drags on like it is this year. So I start pruning as soon as I can stand out there on the snow and then as soon as the snow melts, then I'll bring out the ladder. So sometimes I prune these trees about, you know, about halfway from whatever I can reach on the ground and then later I'll bring the ladders out and prune the upper parts of them. And then I just wanted to show you that, you know, it doesn't always take a lot to keep the trees growing nicely. This is a herald red tree when it was probably maybe seven years old or so, five years old. On the left hand side is the unpruned condition and on the right hand side is the pruned condition. And mainly, you know, still kind of a young tree. So I wasn't pruning it really heavily, just mainly removing the branches that grow upward, the branches that go downward and things that point toward the middle. Just trying to let it, you know, keep on its path. Make sure it stays strong and get strong branches. So in the middle there, that's all the branches I took out of it that year. And, you know, if you really look between the two of them, you can see all those upright branches that I took out. So it was pretty easy that year. They've gotten a lot bigger now, but it's still pretty. So just to kind of get a little further into the pruning, just to help everybody, everybody's afraid to prune or they seem to be afraid to prune. And just want to remind you that the energy for a perennial plant is really in the roots of the plant. So whatever you cut off the top, then that energy is used in the remaining wood. So if you remove stuff that you don't think the plant should have, then the plant can be more vigorous. And I like to think of what Tom Kalb says when I'm pruning, and that is show them who's boss. That's my favorite saying, show them who's boss. It's nice. There's no arguing when you're out there. You can just do what you want with those apple trees. So on the left hand side of this picture, there's a pretty good diagram that I just found this year. You can see how the branch is coming out of that tree trunk. And there is quite the projection of it. That area is the branch collar where the tree suddenly comes down to the branch diameter. That's the collar. And in the middle of that picture, that's a proper cut. On the left hand side, you've left too much. On the right hand side, you've taken it off too far. You can see that that cut that's made, it's too wide. It's going to take more years to heal up, more chances for disease to get in there, for the tree to dry out. And that area, that raised area. So look on the right hand side where those arrows are pointing. That raised area is the branch collar. And that has cells and hormones to help heal up a wound. And it'll do it pretty quickly. And so if you don't wreck that branch collar, it can heal it up quite nicely. So every time you're caught, you're really, you're not cutting right to the original branch or the main branch. You're kind of going to leave a bit of a knob. It's just going to be maybe an eighth of an inch or so. But you're not cutting right to the branch or the trunk. You're cutting at the branch collar. So here's a picture of larger branches, of a larger branch. I'm using my saw on the left hand side. And you can see distinctly where the branch collar is and where the where the branch is, the side branch, the lateral branch. And let's see, will this, oh yeah, there it is. So if you leave, if you cut the, if you cut the branch far away from the main trunk, you're going to get a stub. And stubs are like the bane of my existence. Now that I know about them, I see them everywhere I go. And I bet if you pay attention, you will also see them everywhere you go. And, and they can just dry out. They don't heal properly. They could rot. They could let a rot go back down into like the main branch or the main trunk of your tree. It happens all the time. On the right hand side here, I just wanted to show you that little right hand picture is of a dogwood. So it doesn't have a branch collar. It's a shrub. It doesn't really have a branch collar where those side branches come out of the main area. But it is smart enough to know where it should have been pruned between the red wood and the gray wood. That is where the hormones were able to reach out and seal off that branch. So that is exactly that, that dividing line between the gray dead wood and the red live wood on there is the exact right place to have pruned that. So that is also a stub. It is, it's kind of dead and it's just not a good thing for your tree or your shrub. So no stubs. Don't let, don't let any stubs hang around in your, in your yard. After pruning, there's always training when trees are young. This is the best time to prune them. These were our trees in 2006. I made these little spacers out of the little stakes that we use out in the field. I just took them to our bandsaw that we have, and I cut little Vs in them. And I have to say, I didn't know at first exactly what I was doing. And I did cut those Vs in, but every time it was windy, then the stakes fell out of the tree, the spacers, they fell out of the tree. So then ever since then, I've been cutting them quite a bit deeper. This is almost like a piece of laugh, and I do use laugh when I do spacing on larger trees. And I cut that V quite deep. It's probably close to three inches deep. And then it can last all through a whole bunch of storms without falling out of the tree. So here's a picture of one of our pear trees. The pear trees grow very upright, and they do need a lot of spacing and a lot of help. And I have to say, I'm doing these more than I did those young apple trees. So hopefully they'll turn out all right. But my husband thinks they're artwork. Now that they're quite big, this is a couple years ago, now that they're quite big, I could maybe have 15 of those darn spacers in a tree. So pretty soon, I hope to be able to stop using those. All right. And then back to pruning, what is pruning good for? Mainly to let sunlight into your tree. It helps with the color of the apples. It can prevent funguses in your trees, in the leaves, and on the fruit. So, but I have just a couple examples here for the sunlight. This, I don't know if it's a zesar or a honeycrisp apple, but you can distinctly see that this leaf was against the apple all season long. And then see how the sunlight affects the color of your apples. In this picture, these are two honeycrisps. They're both exactly the same ripeness. They're both really nice. On the left hand side, this apple was growing on the interior of the tree, on the north side, I believe. And on the right hand side was an apple that was growing on the south side of the tree and the sun. But there, yeah, they're exactly the same ripeness. It's just the sunlight did not get to that on the left hand side. So it's just more yellow. And that is the appropriate background color for a honeycrisp. Their background color is yellow, and you can see that in your, in your tree. As you look around at the fruit, watching them, seeing how they're ripening, you can see that background color turning yellow eventually. So this shows the little sooty blotch or sooty mold that can get on apples. This happened this last year. Boy, we had a lot of rain here in Carrington after, after July. And I've never sprayed for sooty mold, but commercial orchards do. You can rub this off with like a damp terry cloth, like a, you know, a kitchen rag or something. You can rub it off. And so it's a little fungus that grows in the waxy coating of the fruit and it won't affect you. It can get so bad that the apple just looks kind of gray and terrible, but it won't hurt you and it won't hurt the fruit. But it's just not very good to look at. So the more air movement and less moisture you have inside the tree, then the less you'll see this. This is the most we've ever seen this past year. So we also do work with thinning our apples. This helps the apples to get big. It prevents little insects from feeding on them or from moisture sticking between the fruits and causing problems. The best time to thin your apples is when they are dined to nickel size. This can be a lot of work if you have a lot of trees. We have, what I say, 22 trees. I do have help from our summer students, but if you have one tree that you can manage and it's not too big, you can definitely remove some of these little fruits when they're, like I said, small, like dime to nickel size. You just kind of bend them over and they crack off. It's really pretty easy, easier than when they get bigger. And if you pick them off when they're quite little like this, it will affect how your tree bears fruit the next year. So if your tree is bearing fruit like every other year, sometimes you can influence that by thinning the apples at this stage. Some trees are really dedicated to every other bearing and you can't influence it, but it can only help to reduce stress on the tree. Your apples will be bigger. They're going to ripen sooner. They're going to be sweeter if they don't have all that competition from other apples. So remember, whatever you leave is what the apple puts its energy into. Yeah, this is a cluster that was not thinned. I believe this is Honeycrisp. Just look at that. Look at the number of those apples. It's just amazing. Every time we have apples together like that, even if it's only two apples where they touch, there's some kind of a little insect or a little worm. There's something that we'll eat and they chew on both of the apples that are touching each other, not just one. And it's just a little two, but then they just most store as well for the winter. And if you want to give them away or sell them, whatever your object is, nobody really wants that. Those are the ones I take home and my husband complains because we never have good apples in our house. I always take home the apples I feel sorry for. So along with thinning the apples, this is kind of how it looks. This is how the apples are spaced when we've thinned them at the research center. And then here's a large branch. We are still getting around 50 or 60 pounds of apples per tree. Maybe we could get more than that. This is kind of how it ends up. We end up with about 200 pounds of apples from four trees at the research center. And oh, this is interesting too. On the left hand side is a Zestar apple I had just picked at the research center that day. And then we went to our friend's house and they have these, I believe they're Zestars, but they are falling on the ground. They're ripe. The ones on the ground are ripe. Then they have these green ones on the tree. Plus you can see there's a little apple there in kind of the center area. So it's just not, it's just not ripening all at once. It's under a lot of stress. There were hundreds and hundreds of apples on this tree. So, and this is how our apples look. They're very large. Maybe you think they're too big and you could leave more apples on your tree. You could also let the grass grow closer to your tree. We keep the whole underside of the apple trees bare. We mulch underneath there, keeps the moisture nice, keeps the roots cool, keeps the weeds out. But if we maybe had a little more competition from grass, we could maybe get those apples to be a little smaller. But I kind of like them big because it's good to make pies with big apples. So I'll just touch on Blackrod. At our field day this year, Jim Walla was visiting and asked about these, this black stuff on the trees. And I said, oh, that's just like a sooty mole that grows from where a little bit of sap leaks down from pruning. Well, I hadn't looked myself and sure enough this branch was infected with Blackrod. Probably this branch had winter injury. It cracked open probably in March or sometime when it froze. And then the fungus got in there and caused some problems. So I cut that whole branch out in August last year. And I have not seen these, but this is a fog-eye leaf spot. You can see there's concentric rings inside those brown spots. And they do have like a little eye inside them. And then this is the disease on apples, which we have not seen either. And that those are concentric brown spots and rings on those apples. Pretty devastating if you have a lot of it. And you can see this. And I have seen clients that have had this in trees because they aren't pruned. They're very thick. And the apples are really moist inside, moist and shaded inside that tree. So Juniper apple rust, it can be quite a problem. On the left-hand side is like one pustule from the top side of a leaf that we saw this last year when it was quite moist. On the right-hand side, that's a great shot of the rust. It's actually on a Juneberry leaf, though. I've never seen anything like this on the apples. But that's how it could look. It's kind of like an alien. It's kind of cool. And then fire blight. We saw fire blight in the third year on one variety of apples. And we have not seen it since. And this year we saw it on sweet 16, quite a bit of it on sweet 16, which is normally resistant to fire blight. So not sure what happened. But yeah, it was kind of icky. You'll see the branches die back. You get the shepherd's crook look with all the leaves dead at once. And then you can see some, there's like some scabs. I'm trying to think of the right word for it. But you can see the bark all kind of curled up on there. On the right-hand side is if it gets into the fruit. There's actually little liquid droplets on that fruit. And then the dead leaves around it. And then this is some of the last thing I'll talk about here is the eastern tent caterpillar. We hear a lot about this. People say, what are these insects? What are these insects? What is this web on my tree? Well, on the left-hand side, that's the egg mass that I saw last year. I saw a lot of them last year. It's a really hard, shiny mass. And it looks like little dried foam. And then on the right-hand side, those are the little worms hatching out. The little caterpillars are kind of cool. And then this is how, you know, this is your standard tent caterpillar, your web that you see in a tree. This is in a plum tree actually. So these are eastern tent caterpillars. They kind of hatch out right around Budburg. And then they'll feed on the tree leaves for like six to eight weeks. They do and they don't do damage. The trees are tough. You know, they've got a second set of buds, a third set of buds even. But to get rid of them, really, I heard that this was the biological control of a 10-year-old boy is like your best control. You give him a stick and you have him go out there and he winds up the tent on his stick. And then that hopefully will let the birds in there and have the caterpillars crawl off somewhere. But if you can just break down that nest, break down that web and pull it to the ground, stomp on them or put them in a bucket of soapy water, that's your nicest control. Otherwise, you can use a pesticide on them. Most of our standard pesticides will kill these caterpillars. They're not tough, but you have to get it inside the web and onto the caterpillars. You can use an easy pesticide like pyrethrums or pyrethrin. And then you could use BT. That is an organic pesticide where little spores of bacteria are sprayed on the tree. Caterpillars eat them and then they don't like them. They die. And then there's also fall webworms. You don't see it too much on apple trees, but in some places it really gets on the choked cherries. In fall, your leaves are mostly done. They're mostly done with all their function for the year. And it's not really a problem. But as Tom called, let me quote him again as he says, the people who seek caterpillars in trees are suffering from more stress than the trees are. And this is true. In the fall, there's just not really a lot going on and not a problem. So there's my short spiel. Like I said, I don't really get a lot of disease in our apple trees. So I'm not really your best expert. But in the chat, we can talk about my favorite apples. We can talk more about pruning if you want and anything else you can think to ask me. So let's hear some questions. Okay. Thank you, Cathy. The first question has to do with apple variety called First Kiss from Minnesota. Have you heard about that one? I have heard about it, but I have to say I don't know anything about it. It's one of the University of Minnesota now is to help pay for their breeding program, they're licensing their apples, and this is their latest one, First Kiss. And this person wants to know when or where they can get one. And home gardeners cannot get one until the pet is over 2034. I talked to Dr. Lubie at the Minnesota Fruit and Vegetable Growers, and that's what he said. Yep, they is contracted out to a company in Washington. And then it's going to be called one thing coming out of Washington and it's going to be called another thing if it's grown in Minnesota. But yeah, no home gardeners till 2034. So there's a lot of other apple trees out there though. There's several thousand. That's right. Cathy, do you irrigate your apple trees? In general, we do not irrigate the apple trees. We water them very well the first year and after that, we had about three or four inches of mulch around them and never watered them after that. But a couple years ago, it was so dry in the fall, maybe that was 2018. The ground was cracked, the apples were just starting to swell, and the earliest ones I barely watered because they were getting very close to being ready to pick. But the ones that were a month later, I did water those. I gave them like 25 gallons of water each, something like that. So but in general, we don't water. We just have a tank that we bring water around with if we need it. We do mulch, we use wood chips, try to get it on there about three or four inches deep if we can, and renew it about every three to four years. It doesn't rot very much in North Dakota because it's so dry. How about your pruning? Do you have the best time to prune? Is spring a better time or is fall a better time? Spring is the best time to prune because in the fall then you might wake up the tree as it's trying to go to sleep. It can't growl at you, but it might cause a little loss of dormancy if the buds are near where you pruned. So the best time is spring when it's kind of almost getting ready to grow. I have read that if you have black rot problems in your orchard or in your tree, you should prune as close to bud break as possible because then it will start to heal as soon as possible. But otherwise just when the temperatures moderate, you know now when it's in the 20s and 30s is a good time to start pruning. Right, like tomorrow, that type of thing. Tomorrow, yeah. I'm going to go out there tomorrow. It's going to be great. My apples are almost done, actually. I'm working on other stuff now. You are so on top of it. That's why everybody should go to see this orchard in Charrington. It is really, I don't know what to say. It is a, I want to say a museum. It's a lot of work. It's a wonderful place to get lost and see all those amazing fruits. How about that? When you select a branch, do you want to take out the vertical ones or the horizontal ones? Do you have any comments about branch angle? Oh, branch angle. Well, your branch angle should be about somewhere between 45 and maybe 60 degrees from what, from horizontal, I guess. The straight horizontal branch will give you the most fruit, but it's going to droop down the most. And then the most vertical branch gives you the least fruit, but more vegetative growth. So the compromise is to kind of have that 45 degree angle. And as the fruit gets heavier and heavier that year, it will bring the branch downward. And then the more a branch leans downward, the more the sugars will accumulate in there is the theory. And then, because if you have a tree that is getting kind of old and it hasn't bloomed for you yet, they say you can take a branch and bend it at an angle toward the ground, further than horizontal angle to the ground. And then during the summer, the sugars should accumulate in there and hopefully then set buds for the next year. So, but for the just general fruiting, you kind of want around that 45 degree angle in the air. How about what's your favorite? My favorite early season is zestar. It is such a delicious apple. I'm going to go back and show that, show those zestars. It's very white inside. It is a, well, it's kind of a tender apple as far as on the left hand side is zestar. Kind of tender as far as it's easy to bite, but it's very crispy. It's flavorful and zesty. I guess zesty, right? What is the word? Oh, Spritely. Spritely is my favorite word. Macintosh is Spritely and a zestar is Spritely. Okay, that's good. That's good. I like it. Hey, how about the way you thin your apple fruits? Is that the same for other fruit trees too? Do you thin those? You would probably want to, you could thin those too at the same. I would, I would guess at the same time when they're small like that, but I'm not sure. Maybe, maybe you mean plums or maybe plums or maybe pears, but yeah, you could, I would thin them right around the same time. I'm just guessing at that though. Again the same way, right? How about for, how long should it take for an apple tree that you bite a nursery to start producing? How long should a new apple grow? I would hope that tree would be in the ground at least three years before it makes an apple because the branches are so wiggly, they're weak, and for sure do not let apples grow on the tips of those branches. If you're, if you see the tree is going to produce apples, try to keep them back toward the trunk, but I mean personally on these standard size trees, I was happy that I started making fruit in their fifth year. That's normally what they say for a full-size tree. If it's a, if it's a dwarf tree, semi-dwarf tree, you might get apples sooner, maybe around that three years old or so, but I would just make sure your tree seems sturdy before you start having a lot of apples on it. Otherwise you can break off a branch, you can just bend a branch, and it'll stay that way permanently after a whole season of all that weight. So just let your tree get hardy. You're going to have it for a very long time. So just, you know, let it grow up a little bit before it has apples. Okay, speaking of a long time, how long does an apple tree live? Oh boy. I think they can live for over a hundred years, but how long will it produce fruit? That's the question. I think, I think Tom might have the answer to this more than I do, but I'm going to say around 20 to 25 years, and after that your tree is probably pretty tired. I think it's just like people. I think once you hit about 35 or 40, you start. Commercial orchards usually start pulling them when they hit 35. I mean, like you say, they will live a long time, but they're just now about, Kathy, what pair of varieties are you testing out there? Oh boy. I got them from St. Lawrence Nursery. So you can look in their catalog, St. Lawrence Nursery out of New York. They have a lot of great northern hardy plants. We have Schrader hardy ND. We had Ayers, A-Y-E-R-S. We have Patton and Stacey, and one from Ely. Oh, it's called Ely. So we have about five kinds. I will say the Ayers, A-Y-E-R-S, was not hardy. I thought it had a little firelight the first year, and then it seemed to have some winter injury and last spring when we had that really cold weather last year. I thought, oh boy, trouble, and sure enough, most of it was dead last year. I just cut it off at the ground, and we'll just maybe put something else there. I have not had fruit yet. They've been in the ground since 2015. They have grown like weeds. Pairs will require a lot of effort from you because they grow really upright. You've got to really space those branches out and keep. You don't want to prune them a lot when they're young because that encourages more growth, but on the other hand, you also have to kind of keep them in shape. So they're going to be an effort, probably for someone who likes pruning. Okay, so now we're going to go through some rapid. We've got lots of interest, and we're going to get some rapid questions here. How about, Kathy, what variety did shiny apple seed grow? He did not grow a variety. Here's seedlings for making cider. Okay, how about that? If I plant some seeds out of an apple, will it set fruit? Well, it will set fruit, but will you like the fruit? That's the question. Apples have crazy genetics, and if you plant the seed from a honeycrisp, you will never get an apple back that looks like a honeycrisp. They have really crazy genetics. They're partying in those seeds, mixing it all up. So you'll get something, but it's not going to be anything. You'll be lucky if you get something that you like by a lottery ticket. Yeah, it can't be a honeycrisp because honeycrisp won't pollinate honeycrisp. Well, that's true, too. How about, okay, so many, how about, here's one about a fruit is dimpled, and on the inside, there's thin brown streaks inside. Oh, I would say, help me, Tom. Is that codling moth, or is that the other one? If it's dimpled, it's apple maggot with those thin brown streaks. Apple maggot, that's it. So, how do you stop that? You should email me, but you can just Google also. But I have read some like more organic type methods, and you can do trapping, I think, for apple maggot, the yellow board with the red center, I think that works actually pretty well. It's a great tool to use. They don't attack till late. Yeah, and something about putting cardboard around the stem of your tree, and they'll crawl from the ground up into that cardboard. So, I haven't had to use this information, but I have it somewhere, so. Wait till it comes. You're lucky they haven't found you yet, because it's a fly, and so it's... So, it's... I like your idea of monitoring for it, and then you can use insecticides. Speaking of insecticides, seven, should you recommend using seven to thin your trees, or do you do all the thinning by hand? Weeds thin by hand, Mr. Tom Cobb has also told me, and I've heard from my friends that he'll grow. Mr. Tom Cobb, it's very touchy to thin by hand. It's very, very touchy. You could just put a few... I mean, you're just doing a few trees. You could put a few extra milliliters in and lose your whole crop. So, I would thin by hand if you're a home apple grower. Yeah, of using chemicals. You have to be careful with those thinners. Yeah, get the kids on it. Yeah, seven is recommended for thinning, but make sure you got to be careful about seven, because seven is a different chemical now. There's two different chemicals. Oh, that's right, that's right. Seven carbaryl will do the thinning, but the seven that's a pyrethroid will not, so that the new seven will not thin the apple tree. Read the label carefully. How about the galas grow well in North Dakota? Oh, no, I think they're from Japan or something like that. They're not hard enough here. Right, they grow great until the first winter, then it's a problem. I'll just say one thing about that. The latest apple you should grow is your honeycrisp. So, if Minnesota has lists of apples, some orchards, there's... On the handout, I think I have Gilbys orchard. They have a really cool handout at their website of when their apples ripen. I would not go later than honeycrisp, because we pick ours the first week of October. I know people in Fargo maybe pick it a week or so earlier, but we cannot get it off the tree really until that first week of October. Okay, it's good to know. Do you have to be careful planting apples near relatives like the mountain ash tree? I don't think so. Mountain ash do get fire blight, so maybe you would want to keep it away. I think they might... I don't know if they get it easier or not than apples do. That's got to be at fire blight. There is a question. And then there's also the Juniper apple rust too, probably. Right, yeah, great. But it would have to the apple and the mountain ash. The mountain ash would not send it over to the apple tree, but the fire blight might be a problem. So many problems. How about do crab apples pollinate standard apples? Yes, they do if they bloom at the same time. So if your neighbor has a crab apple, then you can just plant an apple tree. Great. And how many apple varieties do you need for the pollination and fertilization? Well, you just need two. There are some cases where some won't pollinate each other, but I think that's super rare. And you just have to see that they will bloom around the same time as each other. You know, if it's an early apple or a mid-season apple, there's some sources that will help you with that. Can't eat. I know you've never done this, but do apple trees forgive you if you prune them the wrong way? Well, eventually something else will cover it over. Say compensation. You should clutch your pearls because my normal pruning handout, I say that you will say crap, at least one. Yeah, they're forgiving. Questions about fire blight. Do you have any recommendations about how you control it? You know, I've been reading about it just recently. It's really to prune it out. You can prune it out as soon as you see it, as long as you are pruning, I think it's at least a foot away from that area. In the spring, now when the tree is dormant, you can leave a little less room, little less space between where the canker is, where the dead branch is, and where you prune. But you do have to watch it as far as controlling it otherwise. You know, it comes in on insects and then it gets on the flower. Moisture like rain or dew moves it down the flower and into the branch of the tree. So keeping your tree as dry as you can with more pruning. But they do say that there are some biological controls as far as, well, I know of something called actinovate, which is an actinomyces or a soil bacterium. You can maybe spray some of these biologicals on your tree and those bacteria will out-compete the bacteria that causes fire blight. I have to say I don't know if they're available to the public in a small amount, you know. There also are antibiotics you can spray on your tree, which is, I really don't like the idea of it personally, but they do do that in commercial situations and it is available to the public. It's a streptomycin, but I would, you know, I feel like I would replace the tree with something, a different tree if I was getting so much fire blight that the tree was going to die or I just couldn't get any fruit off of it. I think I would just try a different variety. All right, and how about one last question about have you ever grown any apples for cider? Do you have any recommended varieties? I do not have recommended cider varieties. Minnesota has had a, not as fair, a specialty crop block grant that they have been trying different varieties of cider. And if you really want to know some varieties, give me a call. I think I have some notes in my book and there was a presentation online, which may still be available and maybe I can direct you to that. But no, most of the varieties that people consider to be cider varieties were grown out east. They were grown in England, especially in France. And man, a lot of them are zone five and zone six. So there are apples here that we can grow well for cider, but do they make a classic cider? That's the question. Okay. Well, I think it, I want to think that we had almost all the questions in and we need to move on to the next talk. Thank you, Kathy. This is really interesting. Love the photos. Love the information. And you really generated a lot of interest in that. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, everyone. Good luck with your spring. Bye bye. Thank you.