Queen Cox for the chop

[Lardman]

Can anyone convince me otherwise ?

It's a very light cropper, an absolute magnet for scab, bitter pit and aphids. The fruit are small and loved by maggots, birds and tufty. The odd ones I've managed to save are less appealing than the cardboard cox in the supermarket.

It is a young tree, I think I grafted it 6 years ago perhaps this is a variety which improves with age and I should give it a few more seasons but it's difficult to think given all the problems it will be worth it.

[Guest]

Did you try the fruit before you grafted it? I did for mine and I will happily wait (issues and all) to see if I can manage to get fruit like that again. I just wounder if it is possibly due to the strain?

[burnie]

I'm in a similar position, but with added canker, all my trees are coming out and I will start again next spring in a different spot.

[Scarlet]

The fruit are small and loved by maggots, birds and tufty. The odd ones I've managed to save are less appealing than the cardboard cox in the supermarket.

Do squirrels eat pears?

[burnie]

I eat squirrels(only grey ones though)

[FB.]

Cox seems to be at its best on a very strong rootstock (e.g. M25) in dry chalky alkaline low-fertility soil, with minimal pruning.

[FB.]

Do squirrels eat pears?

Yes, they do, especially early-season pears (July-August ripening). They'll also eat early-season apples.

They'll also eat them long before they're ripe, sometimes even when as small as marbles. Later in the season, squirrels seem less interested in fruits and more interested in hazelnuts, again sometimes eating hazelnuts before they're fully ripe.

[Scarlet]

That explains a lot. My pear tree was stripped. I thought someone had stolen them!
They stripped my hazelnuts too, I had huge crops this year and the nuts are everywhere ..but this year I have no crop of walnuts as my tree has died.

[nickdub]

Can anyone convince me otherwise ?

It's a very light cropper, an absolute magnet for scab, bitter pit and aphids. The fruit are small and loved by maggots, birds and tufty. The odd ones I've managed to save are less appealing than the cardboard cox in the supermarket.

It is a young tree, I think I grafted it 6 years ago perhaps this is a variety which improves with age and I should give it a few more seasons but it's difficult to think given all the problems it will be worth it.

I'd probably plant another tree or root-stock near to your unsatisfactory one and then wait on for a few years - if the QC is still not producing I'd yank it then, to give enough space for the new tree to grow on.

[Kirk]

Reading around it seems to be a self fertile Cox and a few are not sure if a cross or a sport or seedling of Cox. And I do recall reading that if Cox's Orange Pippin were put up for recognition/validation these days it would fail on several aspects.

One said you have to really spray it several times a year for pests and disease.

One book I have lumps Queen Cox with the normal Cox, not seperated out as diferent. It also says that as a commerical apple it was rejected owing to disease in the 1900's until the introduction of lime sulphur sprays.

So if growing organically I suspect you will have problems.

[Lardman]

I can live with the odd problem with a tree if the fruit are worth it... QC was grafted on book recommendations rather than a taste test, I knew what I was letting myself in for decease wise but saw it as reasonable risk/reward at the time. Now I'm slightly older, with even less ways to deal with the problems and with considerably less space left. I'm less inclined to leave unproductive trees alone, especially when the fruit are mediocre here at best.

There are plenty of trees in the nursery bed I can exchange them with and as nobody has said they suddenly sort themselves out after 7 seasons and produce glorious fruit from then on I think they've had long enough.

[devonuk]

What is it about apples that people think there has to be one supreme champion and the rest nowhere? Nobody thinks that one particular variety of peach or pear, or sort of cheese or burgundy, is head and shoulders above all the rest. I wouldn't rush to plant cox even if my growing conditions permitted it.

And the same applies to acidic, leather-skinned Bramleys. What is the point of planting a cooker which just adds one to the monoculture when there are so many alternatives.

[nickdub]

The thing is popular varieties of fruit like popular books are popular for a reason ie many people have tried them and liked them - I grow Coxes and Bramleys because I think they are among the best of their type when grown under English conditions, but even with 5 large trees I struggle to grow enough Coxes some years as they are on the finicky side . However I also grow other varieties of apple mainly to have earlier and later kinds, but also because I like a change of flavour and for pollination reasons,

However I wouldn't recommend Cox and Bramley to anyone who had a small garden and was looking to grow just one or two trees. There are definitely better cropping and more reliable types of apple to grow for people in that situation.

[Hereford fruit grower]

Just to confuse almost everybody, Queen Cox in my garden crops heavy and regularly. I'm in the adjacent county to Lardman and the same county as Nickdub.

It gets virtually no scab. The crop last year was 20-25 kg on a tree about 1.8 m in diameter. It looks like a similar crop this year. Possibly the extra rain seems to have resulted in slightly larger fruit than 2018. (I didn't irrigate although in hindsight certain varieties resented the drought whereas others came through it well. I don't spray although I would if I found an organic method to prevent scab.)

It does better than Jupiter overall. For garden use I'd rate it as fully equal to Sunset, also a 'Cox flavour' apple.

Can any pomologists or other experts explain that? I can't.

But I can't grow good-quality, i.e. 'clean' Crispin. This year a wet June seems to have made the scab even worse than usual.

[Hereford fruit grower]

P.S. To add to my reply, last year the average fruit size on Q.Cox was about 125-150 g, i.e. a good-sized apple. Certainly not small although not nearly as large as say Jupiter, Captain Kidd or James Grieve.