 Hi, welcome everyone. Hi. Welcome to our webinar, The Amazing Apple Tree, presented by Laurel Oldford Down. My name is Lynn Brockington and I'm community experience coordinator at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. This webinar is part of our Fall Garden series. Next Thursday, October 8th, we'll be hosting a virtual tour of three North Shore gardens and on October 15th, Caroline Harriet will be here to demonstrate how to save seeds. You can register for these programs on our website and we'll send you a zoom link to the webinar. Tonight, it's all about apples. Laurel will speak and share images for about 30 minutes. If you have a question, you can type it into the Q&A box at any time and Laurel will answer it after her talk. Now, a bit about Laurel. She was born in Quebec and discovered her love of gardening playing in her grandfather's vegetable garden. She now lives in Cloverdale with her family and no surprise, lots of apple trees. Laurel is a member of the BC Fruit Testers Association and graphs heritage and connoisseur apples for the UBC Apple Festival and then do some gardens. Laurel is also a landscape designer and horticulturalist. Great, thank you so much for coming tonight. I know this is a really busy time of year, so I just so appreciate you making the time to come and talk about apples. Oh, you're so welcome. I am a little bit crazy about apples so it's nice. I have a captive audience now. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for being patient. I'm so excited about apples. I graft for UBC and Van Duzin, both the plant sales. I have a lot in my backyard too and just it's a fascinating, fascinating subject. So save your questions. I'm happy to answer any questions at the end. If you have a question in the middle, if you just want to type it into the chat and you can always interrupt me and I can answer questions at the end, also about any gardening questions. So exciting too. I never was excited about history until I realized that you could actually eat some of it. So the birthplace of the modern apple, the area where some of the oldest trees, the oldest dated trees is actually on the slopes of the Tianxian Mountains. It's a place called the wild apple that grows in these orchards on the mountainside is actually malice subversiae and it is fascinating in that even though it's one variety of apple, the genetic diversity in those wild orchards is amazing. So you have different apples, different colors, different flavors all within that particular variety. So it's just absolutely fascinating. According to DNA evidence, both malice subversiae, so those wild apple orchards and the wild European crab both played a role in the genetic makeup of the domestic apple and the apple traveled. It traveled across Europe, Asia, parts of Africa and finally to North and South America with the European settlers. So North America did also have its own apple and that apple is malice fusca and you can actually still buy it here. It was prized by indigenous peoples in North America and they used it for food, medicinal purposes, as well as that wood. It is quite a hardwood. If you've ever tried to prune some old gnarled apple trees, you'll realize how true that is. So the genome of the apple and those are just some of the apples from my front yard. I have a few more in the backyard. A few years ago, an Italian led team managed to decode the entire genome of a golden delicious apple and what they found was really, really surprising. The apple has 57,000 genes and it's more than any other plant to date and interestingly, more than the human genome, which is only about 30,000 genes. So I don't know if the apple is going to be next to take over the world. It has more diversity than humans. So today, there are over 7,500 apple varieties. In fact, I think actually that's old. We've probably got over 10,000 apple varieties now. About 1,500 can be grown right here, here actually in the lower mainland. So world apple production, we're actually climbing well above 55 million tons and the number one producer is actually China, followed by the US, Iran, Turkey, Italy, Russia, and India respectively. Canada is very, very low on that list of apple producers. Even though Kelowna and Carameas and Vernon would like to say otherwise, they produce spectacular amounts, but just not quite up to the volume that other countries do. And apples, it's just you can see the variety on those plates. They're just really quite amazing. So people, I get this question so often at the nursery. How do you make an apple? Can I just have one apple? How does an apple occur? Do I need to fertilize it, etc? It takes two to tango, but sometimes three. And so it takes two different varieties of apple trees. If you have a triploid, sometimes it takes three. So what you need is the pollen from another apple tree of the flower of one type of tree. So seafoos or, you know, liberty or whatever to be carried onto the stigma of another type of tree. So honeycrisp or golden delicious, golden russet, whatever. So you need that pollen to be carried from one tree to another. Some apples are triploids. They are like the divas of the apple world. They'll produce massive apples. If you have one of those, it will take three apples to pollinate. So some examples of the divas of the plant world are Jonah Gold's Creston apples. They're often really big apples, but they are pollen sterile. So if you want to have one of those in your backyard, you're actually going to need two other apple trees to go along with it if you want to have apples on all three trees. So remember, if you don't have bees, you don't have apples. We'll just, I'm going to take a short diversion into bees. They are so important. A lot of people don't realize that there are more than 450 species of bees in BC or in the Northwest, and they are actually facing quite a few challenges. We have a lot of development, a lot of habitat loss. Most of those 450 species of bees are soil dwelling, about 80% of them dwell in the soil. So when you have development, interestingly, when you have over cultivation in your gardens, if they're soil dwelling and you are constantly hoeing in your garden, weeding, etc., you're actually sort of destroying some of their little little burrows. And if that's not an advertisement for having a slightly messy garden, I don't know what is. Neonics or neonictenoids, it's a very widely used insecticide. And the reason they use the neonictenoids is that it has really low toxicity to mammals. Unfortunately, it has a devastating effect on bees. It tends to bind to the receptors in the brains of insects with great veracity. Bees have an abundance of these type of receptors, and that's why it's so devastating to them. Apples pollinated by bees affected by neonics will actually have 30% fewer seeds. And we think that this might be that the bees are a little bit more sluggish. There's less movement on the flower, and perhaps they bring less pollen, but it's an interesting percentage. What can we do to help? If you want to encourage bees to help pollinate your fruit trees of all kinds, plant a succession of flowering plants from late winter right through to Halloween. Some examples of late winter flowers would be witch hazels, even hellebores. The bees love those, skimmya. I have lots of bees on my skimmya, and plant them right through spring and right through into Halloween. So those roobeckias, the black-eyed seasons, are just wonderful, mine are still covered with bees. Cultivate less, and that makes me very happy. I have a slightly weedy garden, but if you can cultivate less, that will help, especially if you have a sunny south-facing slope. That is ideal bee condominium areas. Try not to spray pesticides. So if you have fruit trees, vegetable gardens allow for collateral damage. If you like the vegetables and the fruit, other creatures will like the vegetables and the fruit as well. So allow for collateral damage. It's okay. It's okay to have a couple of holes in your fruits and your vegetables. During dry periods, think about putting out some bee watering stations. I think we've all seen those on Pinterest, but it's simply a little clay tray, and you can use pebbles. You can use marbles. I just find it's easier pebbles. Partially fill it with water so that some of the rocks are still sticking out. What that does is it's a safe place for bees to land, and then they can have a sip of water. You often see bees falling into pools or ponds. What it is is they're really thirsty, and they're betting their life that they can get a drink and get away, and sometimes it doesn't work for them. So I had this question at the UBC Apple Fest. This is one of my favorite questions. If I plant the seed from a honeycrisp apple, will I get a honeycrisp tree? No, you will not. I had a grandpa come up to me with his grandson, and they were proudly holding three little apple seedlings that they had grown from seed from a honeycrisp tree, and the rest of the apple folks sent them to me. They didn't want to have to tell them the bad news. I explained to them that the seeds are a combination of the parent plants. So those seeds that you grew are a genetic combination of those two plants that pollinated, that created the apple. The apple is just a protective covering around the really important thing, which is the seed. As far as the apple tree is concerned, you will only get about one in 10,000 of those combinations produce something tasty. The rest that we like to refer to as spitters. So when I told the grandfather, I explained it that you have a one in 10,000 chance of having the next honeycrisp, something possibly even better. And he was okay with that. He was all right with that gamble. But the grandson seemed a little unconvinced. And so when I explained to him, I said that you have a greater chance of these apple whips being something so terrible that your friends will almost certainly spit them out. And he was quite excited about that. So he was hoping, I think, to try out some of these apples on some unsuspecting friends. So I never did find out which he got the one in 10,000 or one of the spitters, but it was one of my favorite visits at the UBC Apple Festival. So if I can't plant a seed to get a honeycrisp, how do I get one? So the only way to get the apple that you're eating, so if you have a honeycrisp tree or the neighbor does, or if you have a piece good, none such, that's one of the trees that I have in my front yard. How do I make another one? Well, you graft. So it's basic woodworking. So you stick a piece of the original tree. So one of the tips about the width of a pencil, so that past season's growth. And you put it onto a rootstock apple. So a rootstock apple is probably one of those seedling apples. We use some standard rootstock apples, but it's back in the day they used to use the Femus apple tree. Because interestingly, that Canadian, that famous Canadian apple tree is one of the few to come true to seed. So they would seed a whole bunch of Femus, use them as rootstock. So you'd cut the rootstock, you'd sort of stick on the end of the other apple tree and using that's one type of graft, the whip and tongue graft, or the side veneer graft you can see. And you create a brand new apple with it. So I have this question at the nursery where I work very often. I only have a small patio. I want to grow my apples in a pot. But I really love my parents' old Bramley's English seedling. I had a customer ask that. And how can I get it? Can I grow that big tree in a pot? I never thought I could. Well, if you use a rootstock, a dwarfing rootstock, they will slow down growth. So if you have a very big burley tree like a Bramley's, oh gosh, or Creston apple, you can use a really dwarfing rootstock. One of the ones that I like to use is an M26 rootstock, a very romantic name. But that one slows down the growth and seems to push fruiting. Some rootstock apples can dwarf growth. Some provide great anchorage. So they've sort of researched these rootstock apples enough so that, you know, if you're in a windy site, you maybe want to use an M111 rootstock. That one has fantastic anchorage. If you only have a patio, you want to grow it in a pot, well, maybe an M26 or a B9. So we have all of these romantically named rootstock apples. And basically, it's like either increasing the size of the food straw for the apples or putting a kink in it to slow growth. So the really cool thing of grafting, which I find absolutely, absolutely fascinating, is you're taking a piece of the original genetic material with relatively few changes. So if you have the Bramley seedling apple tree, you're not just planting a copy of it. You're planting the Bramleys. You're not just having a copy of the Picasso. You are planting the Picasso of apple trees, which is fascinating. That's the cool thing about grafting. It is almost, almost genetically identical material to the original material. And that's why we old timers care so much about teaching people to graft. So if you ever want to have grafting classes, and that's maybe something we can do down the road. But the more people that know how to graft, how to save seeds, how to grow things from seed, the more capable you are, and the better able you are to preserve history, even the types of history that you can eat. You won't often see Bramley seedlings in grocery stores. Grocery stores will usually have maybe five different varieties if we're lucky. But if you think about it, 1500 varieties that you can grow here quite well, actually, and you only are seeing five. I just think that's a shame. So if you can learn how to graft, you can get all of these weird and wonderful apple trees. Scab and canker and apple maggots, they do have their challenges. We have wet springs in the lower mainland, and they create wonderful growing conditions for apple scab. So we have a lot of scab resistant varieties. There is a couple of things that you can do. You can certainly spray with lime sulfur, dormant oil, but I prefer to clean my orchard and then assess use integrated pest management techniques. There are pros and cons to every step you take. What I prefer to do is actually interrupt the life cycle. So with apple scab, rake the leaves and remove in fall. Don't put it into your home compost if you have a green waste removal. We do in Cloverdale here. I will put those leaves just like the rose leaves into that green waste removal and the city can take it. You can dormant spray lime sulfur in the winter if you have to, if you have a terrible apple scab problem. But what I would suggest for you is if you're going to spray at any time, take a few minutes and sit out there. And if you see any movement, any bees, even if you don't think the things are bees, there's such a huge range of sizes in our native bees and other pollinators from things that are the size of a pinhead to our large bumbles. So just sit out there for five or ten minutes and observe. If you see some things flying, you've missed your window of opportunity. Try again on another day if you wanted to spray. You can, like I was talking about plant scab resistant varieties or what dairy does. And in that picture, this is my friend Dairy. Her orchard is called Dairy's Orchard. You can Google that. And she also has a list of apple trees that she graphs as well. And she and Bill built this structure in their orchard. And so they have varieties like Fuji and Jonah Gold, and they are grown organically. Those structures help prevent the rain from splashing the spores of apple scab. They also create really cool, a little microclimate. So they create a little miniature carameous inside those tents. And in the wintertime, they roll the plastic back off. Otherwise, Mother Nature would be sending that plastic into the next door park and roll it back on before the blossoms open in spring. So if you really want to plant something like an ezepis spitsenberg, which is a very fantastic tasting apple, but it catches everything but the common cold, you would treat it by roofing it or growing it under the overhang, south facing overhang. Treat it just like a peach. Apple canker is also a challenge that we have. There are some canker resistant varieties, but there's not very many of them. What you can do is, if you have it, remove affected branches or cut out the canker immediately. Jim Ray from Annie's Orchard, he said, if you walk through your orchard or, you know, even if your orchard is one or two trees, just do a walkthrough in your front and backyard and observe. If you have a small spot of canker, cut it out, scrape it out, paint it with a two to four percent bleach solution, disinfect all your cutting tools. So if you have a really badly affected canker on the main trunk, remove the tree. It's, you know, it's really, really sad. You can replace, you can plant another tree, try planting a more canker resistant tree. Plant trees on full-size rootstock. So if you plant trees on a full-size rootstock, again, we're talking about that rootstock, there's more push, there's more vigor. So often you'll be able to scrape out that canker. There'll be a ton of push in that tree, and you will end up with one of those old apple trees, gnarled with holes in them, just like my grandfather had. You know, you could, you could store your bag of marbles inside that, that hole in the one side of the apple tree, and the apple will still keep growing. So there's, there are ways that you can work with it. If you have canker, think about what caused it. Canker needs ideal conditions. So it's kind of awesome if you have as much sun, at least six hours of sun a day for an apple tree. You want some good air movement. So, you know, you want to thin out your tree so that you could hold a conversation with somebody on the other side of the apple tree. You want, you don't want a massive hedge around your tree sort of stopping all air movement. So, sort of the cleaner you have it, the more airflow, the better chances you are have of avoiding this. Coddling moth. We have a lot of coddling moth damage. I know my neighbor does. They overwinter actually in, in cocoons, in bark of trees, of your apple trees, or in the mulch. Once the temperature warms, the larva emerge and, and they're ready to, ready to find their, their mates. So the, the females lay eggs on the fruit. Once the, the worms mature, so the worms go into the fruit, they eat a little bit. Then they drop from the feeding site, looking for a place to pupate. With coddling moths, unfortunately, with our long summers, there are often three generations. Control, again, it's cleanliness. So remove affected apples. Dormant oil has some success in coating the overwintering cocoons. Keep in mind though that some of your mason bees may also be overwintering on the bark of your apple trees. Surround is available commercially. It's like, it's a kaolin clay spray. They use it a lot back east. It makes your orchard or your fruit trees look very ghostly. It's just basically they are disguising the apples. So the coddling moth, she is looking for a nice red apple, preferably to lay her eggs on. You'll often find that if you have rasseted apples, and that's apples with that leathery skin, that greeny colored apple, they are not as badly affected. So if you can disguise, surround will hopefully eventually make it to the home garden because it is, I think it's 95% clay. So yes, you do have to reapply. Pheromone traps, handling or banding, sorry, banding of the trees in spring and fall to trap moths is also mildly effective. So you can ban with cardboard and keep removing the cardboard. So as the female climbs up the trunk, you can remove that cardboard and toss it away and keep doing that. Jim from Annie's Orchard actually on some of his smaller trees tried draping remake cloth. Or if you have some old curtain shears or can go by value village, if you have a tiny apple tree, you can try using remake cloth as a disguise, basically a barrier disguise method. I know Dary and her orchard this year put 200 little footies, little sock bands around her apples. She is amazing and far more patient than I am. So I did not do that. And I didn't do too badly this year. Apple maggot. So apple maggots, they also overwinter in the soil and emerge in late spring as flies. They lay eggs just under the skin of the apple. With coddling moth, you don't have a lot of damage inside the apple. It's annoying. You can cut around it and I still use for applesauce. For apple maggot, they really have their way with the insides of the apples. Sometimes you can get two generations per year. The control, again, cleanliness, pick up and dispose of fallen and infected apples. Surround has some success. What we're also looking at too, because apple maggots spend some time in the soil. Some of the nematodes may reduce the soil dwelling apple maggot. So the nematodes that we are looking at for taking care of shaper grubs may have some effect actually on the apple maggot. So we're taking a look at that. I don't want to say it out loud, but I think I've been lucky with apple maggot. I'm knocking on wood right here. I've been lucky in my own garden. But just the same, I think I might like to water in some nematodes and see, make sure that I'm sort of preventing that. So apples are not all serious. We need something fun after the scab and maggots. There are some awesome, awesome apple traditions out there and how to make your kids think that you're completely crazy. If you need dating help, I'm just saying you need to peel an apple and try and get a single peel. If you throw that apple peel over your left shoulder, you should be able to recognize the initial of your crush. I don't know. I think they're all probably going to look like an S or a G, but this is what they used to do. If you are undecided and this is one from the Victorian days, if you are undecided between a number of suitors, wow, that's not a bad problem, you print their initial or they carve the initial onto an apple seed. You stick the seeds onto your forehead and the last seed stuck on is the one. I would usually just interview them, but that's okay. The apple seeds will work. What's sailing? This is the best tradition ever and I am definitely doing it again this year. My neighbors already think I'm crazy, so that's all right. So on the 12th night of Christmas, so for those of you that need an actual date, the 12th night of Christmas is actually January 17th. It's customary to sail or sing to the oldest apple tree in the orchard. If you don't have an apple tree and you don't have an orchard, sing to the oldest plant in your yard. If you don't have a yard, look around at your house plants. If you have the oldest air plant, whatever works for you. So you're going to need to soak toast and then place your toast in the branches. Now, bear with me because this gets even better where your best was sailing does and there will be singing. So if you're around my family, it's quite bad sailing singing, just really quite awful. But the cider helps. At least helps me think that I sing better. Later after the cider or the cider toast, if you're really desperate and you've run out of cider, there will be dancing and then much later firing off of muskets if you really want to be accurate. But I would maybe suggest not doing that one or you're going to get some visitors to your house. So the idea behind all of this craziness, as amusing as it is, is you wanted to, you want to wake up the trees and you want to scare off the bad spirits. So the bad spirits, they're going to hear two seconds of my singing there out of there. And the trees, you want to wake them up and you want to encourage them to have a very, very good year. So what I can do, this is where I usually have the apple tasting. So I don't have any apples for apple tasting and I'm sorry, we can do this next year and you'll get to, you'll get to see the apples. But what I'm going to bring up here, I'm going to stop the share here. Hello guys. And I'm going to bring up some of my actual apples. So I just picked some of these in the front. And this little guy is Liberty. And Liberty, if you look, has a little bit of a film on it. It's called a bloom. And so here I'm going to shine it. And now you can see, you can shine off the bloom. The bloom actually helps Liberty. It's a scab resistant variety. And it's quite a lovely little tree. Now Liberty you can often get at many of your local orchards. It's crunchy. It has that sweet tang, that little bit of, oh, strawberry flavor. Liberty you could probably drag behind your vehicle on the way home and it will still try to overproduce, which is kind of a good problem to have. This beautiful russeted apple here is Bramley's, or actually no, Bel de Boscoop. Oh, I got to put on my glasses. So this is Bel de Boscoop. And it's a very, very old apple, I believe, from the 1700s. And you can see the russeting. There is a little bit of red on it. Bel de Boscoop has actually, I believe, almost as much vitamin C, if not more than an orange. And it's a great apple for cooking. I have another amazing one here. This beautiful little apple, you can see right here, with a little bit of russeting around the stem end. It looks very similar to a Cox's orange pippin. And actually one of the parents of this is a Cox's orange pippin. This is Poppy's Wonder. And Poppy's Wonder came from Vancouver Island from a lady named Poppy about 100 years ago. And her parents owned a shipping company. And they were from England. And each year, they would get in a couple of crates, they would have them shipped over of Cox's orange pippin. And they would eat them right there where they unpacked them. And they would throw the seeds over into this hedge row. And this fruit tree, this apple tree, grew from one of those seeds. And so we do know that it is a very lovely Cox's orange pippin cross. And it has the flame and a little bit of citrus to it. It keeps fairly well. But this is one that you will probably not ever see unless you come to the UBC Apple Festival one year, or Vanduze and Gardens. And you might see a couple of these trees for sale. Now I am ready to, if anybody has any questions, I would absolutely love to answer the questions. And they can be apple questions and even gardening perennial questions. What have you? So throw them at me. Okay. So you know what I'm going to do is there's a couple in the chat. So why don't I read them out? You can also read, see them in the chat and then we'll go from there. So the first one's from Judith and she says, when you get a chance, okay, what causes brown spot on leaves? That's number one. Number two, what causes scab on apples? Not a soft spot and inside looks like dirt sometimes. Okay. So scab on the apples. And if the inside looks like dirt, that sounds like coddling moth damage. And so without grossing you out, the dirt that is inside the apple is actually frass or the worm poop. I'm sorry. But if you see stuff that looks like little flecks of dirt inside that you have had a coddling moth visit and often you will not have any holes on the apple. They'll often come in the stem end. But you cut open the apple and you'll see that frass. This brown spot on leaves can be sunburn, can be scab as well. So that can be scab as well, I think. Okay. Okay. And my, so I have another question from Amber. Yeah. My apple tree, not a big one, is not in an ideal location now. It's in the shade of a magnolia tree and also other bushes surrounded. What shall I do? Any chance I can transplant it? Amber, absolutely you can transplant it. The best time for transplanting your apple tree is when it's dormant. So January, February is a fantastic time to transplant. You pick that one sunny day that we are given in those two months and start by root pruning. So root prune about three feet in diameter around the tree depending on the size of your tree and use a sharp spade and cut all the way around. Now most trees and shrubs grow, their roots grow out horizontally between six and eight inches beneath the surface of the soil. So you don't need it to be massively deep. You just need maybe nine inches deep or 10 inches deep to make sure you get as many roots as possible. You can trim the tree as well a little bit so you can thin out the tree just so you can make it easy to transplant. Some people tip all the branches. I don't like to tip all the branches because in the apical stems the tips of the branches have a hormone that when the tree wakes up the tips of the branches tell the roots to grow. So I always cringe when I see people really hack and prune and tip all the branches when they're going to transplant. I agree that you do need to thin out some of the branches to lighten it up but leave some of the tips because that's going to tell your roots to wake up and grow. We have another one here. Can you tell us how and when to prune the apple trees? This is a fantastic question. Pruning of apple trees and almost any other tree, pruning in the winter when your tree is dormant will invigorate the tree. It's like stepping on the gas. So the tree has already moved into fall. It's gone to sleep and if you remove a ton of the branches it's going to wake up in spring. It's going to have all of this sugar stored and that's why you see the branches sort of shoot up after you do a winter prune. If you want your tree to slow down, if you have a very big apple and you want your tree to slow down, it's filled its space and it's lovely and you're like this is sort of the right size, then you change your pruning to the end of July, beginning of August. What that does is before the tree starts to store up sugars to prepare for waking up in spring, you've actually reduced the size so it stores up fewer sugars, it stores up less energy so you don't get that shoot up in the spring. This is one technique that we can use to slow down trees and shrubs. It goes for almost all trees and shrubs. If that helps, can you graft onto a very old tree and what is the best time of year to graft from Jody, I think? So yes, absolutely you can graft onto a very old tree. As long as you mark and you have a vigorously growing branch somewhere in the top of the tree, the tops of trees and shrubs tend to have more vigor in them. The lower branches, probably the ones that you can reach unfortunately, don't have a lot of vigor. So if you did want to graft another variety onto an older tree, pick one of the top branches, bring, shorten it a little bit and yes, you can do a side veneer graft. I have one Canada rennet that has, what is it, Grimes Golden. I've grafted Grimes Golden and so I went to look at it today and I was trying to bring in the Grimes Golden but it was just out of reach so I'm going to have to get my ladder out there. So it did work but often older apple trees will have a little bit lower vigor. Nice, nice. So Laurel, I'm going to open the Q&A now and there's six questions in there. The first one is from Monique. I have an apple tree in a pot on my deck. It has lichen growing on its branches and on buds. What is causing this and what do I do? Okay lichen is not harmful at all. It's probably the shady side although there is some lichen that is sun tolerant. I would just leave it. It doesn't do anything. If you have a ton of lichen and it's starting to retain moisture, the only harm that it could do is that it could retain moisture if you have enough lichen and then you would just scrape it off. But lichen, it kind of looks pretty in the winter. I have an old tree and I was quite happy to see some moss and lichen. I'm like, oh now it has jewel tones in the wintertime. So the only time I worry is just sort of in the crotch of branches. Sometimes I'll get some moss build up and I don't want the moisture to sit there so I'll just push the moss off there. But otherwise it's all good. It's all good. So there's a question about summer pruning and you may have already addressed this. She just says, please explain summer pruning your apple trees. Yeah and sometimes another reason for summer pruning end of July beginning of August is to allow a little more light onto the apples so you'll get better color up on the apples. It will also slow down growth so you can prune for any number of reasons. I would do slightly less pruning in the summer so if you're going to summer prune for reasons like better color on apples or slowing down your tree, I would remove no more than one quarter of the branches of the tree whereas pruning in the winter you may remove up to one third of the branches. Now sometimes that's just one cut so keep looking at your pile that you're pruning as well as looking at the tree because sometimes especially when I have hubby help me, I hear husband in the background. He heard me. You have to keep looking and making sure that you don't take off too much. So what's the problem with taking off too much? You can stress out the tree. So if you take off too much, yeah, you can stress the tree. If you stress the tree it leaves it more open for pests and diseases so. Okay good and so Jane is asking, can you recommend an apple that is dense and crisp like Gravenstein that stores quite well? Oh dense and crisp. If you want sweet and crisp, oh gosh if you don't mind a russet, an egremont russet would work. Grimes golden is another spectacular apple tree. Oh do I just have to pick one? You could probably mention more than one. My favorite apple tree of all time and it's quite dense and quite crisp. Although yeah you do have to you do have to store it in the cooler. Is Carmen de Sonnaville and it is off the scale in sugars and off the scale in acids. I think of that as the red bull of apples. So I mean those are a few. I would urge you to test out now if there are still a few farmers markets out there I think. Or look at BC Farm Fresh Guide and you can pull down the subheading of apples and there are still many places that you lots of local orchards that you can get apples from and taste, taste a variety. Yeah nice. So another request for recommendation. So Richard's asking can you recommend varieties that do well in Vancouver? Have a crisp tart flesh and are fairly resistant to pests? Crisp and tart, boy. Tart definitely my Bell de Bosco, very resistant to pests and massive massive. This is actually a small. This one's a small apple for Bell de Bosco. Very nice and tart. Creston is another spectacular apple. That's a triploid. It has that lovely tart bite to it. Renette Simarenco is tart off the tree, but that's a very interesting apple. That's a Russian apple. So if you want crisp and tart pick it early, pick it off ripe and eat it early. The cool thing with Renette Simarenco is in storing it'll develop sugar. So my most tart apple off the tree develops into an apple that I use in exchange for a cup of sugar while I'm making applesauce. So I'll actually put in a cup of Renette Simarenco and that is the only apple that has actually gone up into space with the cosmonauts. Yes, they love that apple so much. They brought it with them. Amazing. Wow. Jillian, as I've said, my friend has a really overgrown large crab apple. When would be a good time to prune it to make it a lot smaller? So the large crab apple, if it's really overgrown, I would still take advantage of a winter prune because you probably don't want to sit on it for a full season. So take advantage of a winter prune, do a little bit of a winter prune to remove dead disease damaged and to cut out some scaffolds and then do that same year end of July beginning of August. That's when you do a second bit of a prune to start renovating it. So at that point then you just adjust to summer pruning. You might not be able to renovate it all at once. So think of it maybe as a two or three year project. Be patient. It will work and just remove, if you need to remove any larger scaffold branches, try doing it in the winter. Leave summer pruning for smaller branches. Okay, good. And there's another pruning question. So Marlene's asking about pruning my cordon trees. I have trouble distinguishing the fruit buds from the others. Supposedly the fruiting buds are knobby rather than pointy, but they all look pointy to me. Well, you get plenty of fruit. What in fact is the difference between the two? You'll often see it's a slightly different type of wood on the fruiting spurs. And the fruiting spurs remain really quite small. Those will always be the fruiting spurs for your apple each year. And so I, you know, when I had, when my kids were younger and they would help me pick the apple trees, they would end up ripping off half of the fruit spurs. And so it looks like almost elephant skin. Males, if I'm not mistaken. And it's a, you're very old apple tree. If you can get some type of barrier on that apple tree. So if you can do drapery shears, even if it's not perfect, if you can disguise even a section, you can do a bit of an experiment. You can also try nematodes as well. It's certainly not proven to work, but because the maggot does spend some time in the soil or coddling moth, spend some time in the soil, both of them, that may have some approach. So I think you would have to do a multi pronged approach. Worst comes to worst, remove all the tree, the apples and skip a year. When you have such devastating coddling moth damage, look around at your neighbors. If there's an old abandoned apple tree, often we have a development going in and there was a big orchard and those apples were just sort of creating that life cycle. They were dropping, coddling moth was really taking off in that old orchard. So look around and just see if there's no other trees, if you don't have a massive orchard next to you that's been abandoned, then you do have hope to reverse that damage. How many different, I have another question from Judith North Van. How many different apple types do you have? And can I comment on my irrigation? Right now, I think I have about 60 varieties. Some of them are in pots. You may have noticed that Van Duesen Plant sale didn't happen this year. UBC Apple Festival. They've taken much fewer apples this year. So I have, yeah, 60 to 70 varieties of apples. So just a really cool selection. Commenting on irrigation. You know what, Judith, this fall I am going to get some irrigation in. They were all hand watered, I'm afraid. So yeah, that took quite a while. So for my apple trees in the ground, I love using green mulch. So I'll often use perennial geranium. If you want the specific variety, it's the macarizum album. It forms a lovely low evergreen sort of tree circle. It's got lovely, that lovely fragrant leaves. The bees really like it and it holds the moisture in to the ground and the weeds down. So think about using living mulches and green mulches. For those trees that are in the ground, I water them much less. During our hot weeks, I think they got drinks of water about twice a week. And I tried using soaker hoses for those. All right. Do you, can you see any more questions? I don't see any more. But to be honest, because I lost my connection, Laurel, I lost the chat that was there and the Q&A. So I think, I think, unless you see some more there, I'm just going to scroll down and I'm going to see. Let's see. Oh, ambrosia apple tree with a very tall center stem about three feet. How much can I prune out? Very young tree. Well, Kathleen, it all depends what you want to do. If you're going to escalate it, you could prune out as much as two feet if you want it. I would just take out maybe a foot. So if it's a single whip, you want to prune it where you want to see those side branches. So if you want side branches to start at two and a half feet, prune it there. That will be where those side branches will start. And that will, it's not going to grow up, as a lot of people say. It's two and a half feet. So yeah, I would prune it at about two and a half feet if you want your side branches to start a little bit later, then you don't have to prune it yet. Can you speak about pruning espaliered apple trees? Espaliered apple trees from Heather, they are simply apple trees that have been pruned into really cool shapes. Some look like candelabras. You can have diamond shapes. I would definitely do the pruning of espaliered apple trees in, if you've got an old espalier prune it in the summer. If you've got a brand new espalier and you want to push a lot of growth, do that pruning in the winter if that helps. And Joan Bentley, hello Joan Bentley. That's a name I recognize. How can I be sure when to pick my apple trees for best flavor? If you know what variety of apple tree is, that's a little bit of a cheat. You can look up timing, give or take. If we've had a really hot summer, expect to have about two to three weeks sooner. So for best flavor you want again that little bit of sort of underlay, a gentle underlay of gold. Don't wait till it goes bright yellow because oftentimes your apples are a little punky by then, a little softer by then. Other than that, I actually just walk by and take a bite out of it. I'll pick off an apple and test it. If I think it's getting really close, I will do some testing. So Joan sometimes is just trial and error, but that gentle underlay of gold and knowing what variety you have will definitely help. Let's see. I think I have another one. I think that might be everything. Anybody? Do you have any more? I just saw a thank you from someone who had to leave. So I think that was it. But maybe before we wrap up, we could just talk about where to purchase apple trees. So yeah. So as you said, the UBC Apple Festival is a modified version this year. It's the apple market. There are about 30 varieties for sale there, and I think it's you just order online and pick up. You were saying as well, you can contact some of the growers directly. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that, Laurel. So check out the UBC Apple Festival first. And because they've got apples as well from folks from the island. And so if you don't see what you want there or they've sold out, then you can also you can you can email me as well urban fruitery at Shaw.ca. So that's U-R-B-A-N-F-R-U-I-T-E-R-Y at Shaw.ca. Or you can Google Dairy's Orchard. And she together, we have a list of a lot of the apple growers. So we still have a lot of apples, a lot of varieties. And if I don't have it, then I will know that maybe Justin has it or Dairy has it or Lisa. So we kind of work together when you're a crazy apple person, you just, you know, you work together. And if there is a variety that we don't have, then it's one that we can hunt for the scion wood when we have next year's AGM and scion wood share. The other time to get it is in spring. Didn't have it this year, but the Van Dusen Plant sale is another fantastic opportunity to buy, you know, apples, small fruits, as well as some other things. So hopefully we will figure out a way to make that happen this next spring. But that's always, it's it's an awesome, awesome event. So yeah, you know, we just we just had to take a pause this year. But yeah, so when would you plant your treat? So say you, if you, well, I guess if you purchased one now, you could put it in. The best time for planting trees and shrubs and even some hardy perennials is actually fall. So fall, the hopefully mother nature will help us with a little bit more rain, but not all in one week, preferably like last week. So the the soil is still quite warm. The air is cool. So we don't have a lot of top growth on our trees and shrubs, but there's still a lot of root growth going on. And that allows our plants to anchor in for one full season and us not have to worry about the watering until next year. And it gives our plants a little bit of a boost. If you have any borderline hardy things like olives or or even the hardy oranges or anything that you want to, you know, push the boundaries, then that is best to wait for spring. But anything else hardy fall is a great time. Okay, good. Okay, good. All right. Now, there's one more question. And I do mind answering one more. And it's from Jillian. And it is about the question about how do you know when to pick an apple. And she says, I thought you picked up the apple. And then when the stem was tough, it would snap off. And that was meant it was ready to pick. Is that not true? That is true for some varieties. Each variety is different. So for example, Co's golden drop and transparent, when they are perfectly ripe, they drop from the tree. Which helps you nod at all. Often, Dairy said in her orchard, she'll look down the row. And if she sees a couple of apples dropping from the tree, then she knows that they're more or less ready to pick. For your taste though, if you tend to like a slightly more tart apple, you want to pick it slightly early, slightly off ripe. And I tend to like things a little bit more tart. Hubby tends to like them sweeter. So he'll wait till they're perfect. Some varieties, yes, when you tip up that apple, they'll come off. Some varieties, it's not that easy. Yeah. On the golden russet, it seems every third apple, you kind of have to rattle with it. But yeah, depending on your variety. Wow. Well, thank you so much. This has been so terrific. And thanks so much, Laurel. So appreciate it. And thank you everyone for coming and all the great questions. It's really so much fun when we get all these people in and all the things that they ask. Great. Good night, Laurel. And good night, everybody. Thanks so much. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.