Scab in a young apple tree

[archiecolliedogParticipant]

Help! I think my tree, container grown and planted in May, has scab. I’ve come back from a week away to find black spots on the leaves, plus a couple of leaves with brown running along one length and curling over, plus black patches on two apples that I’d not found and removed before I went. It’s a family tree with 3 varieties grafted onto MM106: Egremont russet, Sunset and Fiesta. One graft seems less badly affected; I think it’s the russet but can’t read the label in the half-dark! My neighbour has a cox and a bramley; I don’t know whether they are healthy. What shall I do? I’d prefer not to use chemicals but I don’t want to lose the tree before it’s even established.

[charlesModerator]

 Scab is not life threatening to a tree unless it is really bad, for instance if you live in a very rainy area, and have susceptible varieties. Sunset is good as it resists scab a lot, your other two are only slightly susceptible.

When leaves are wet for any length of time, and also if a tree is feeling weak for whatever reason, scab is worse. MM106 is a vigorous variety and I wonder if it best suited to container growing, if you have access to soil for planting it would be happier, otherwise you have to do a lot of watering and feeding, or re-potting. Try spreading some extra multipurpose compost on top of the container for now.

 

[archiecolliedogParticipant]

Thanks very much, that’s a relief. In fact, it doesn’t look so bad this morning: perhaps I was panicking a bit! The tree is in the ground – I meant that I bought it in a container rather than bare-rooted – and I put mycorrhizal fungi in the hole and mulched it with plenty of good compost so I thought I’d done everything I could to give it a good start. I didn’t really want a family tree as I thought they might not be so vigourous – what do you think?

[charlesModerator]

 Sounds good then. Tree vigour mostly comes from the rootstock and MM106 is four out of five (smallest is M27 then M9 then M26 and most vigorous is M25). So you are ok for a fair sized tree.

Family trees are fine, mostly, but can be tricky if one variety eg Bramley is more vigorous than others. Your three varieties sound well matched for equal vigour so let’s hope they get on and grow at roughly the same speed with none taking over.

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