Old apple trees

[southlondongardener]

But you do not need to prune it rather remove the flowers I think (the advice was from a web site). I think even biennal bearers will not biennal bear if you treat them right.
Google bramley and biennal bearer for more advice.

[Nicos]

You know- I'd be tempted to ask one of your neighbours who also has apple trees- they're bound to have the same problem!

Now where's that babelfish??????

[bobleponge]

Nicos
There are some wonderful reasons for living where we do, one of them is having no neighbours .......oh bother.

[FB.]

An old thread that I stumbled across while using a search engine for something completely different. Small world, eh?
But I believe that I can offer some useful information, which makes it worth dragging out of the archives.

The picture shows galls and woolly apple aphids (WAA).

I have copied and edited the picture, to indicate the woolly aphid colonies hiding in the lumps of the galls:



It is likely that the woolly aphids caused the galls some years ago, when the branches were merely green fleshy stems. The young bark was damaged and disfigured by the WAA feeding activity and the aphids continue to use those wounds for food and shelter each year. The galls may well continue to grow slowly until the tree dies.
It will be very difficult to get rid of the woolly aphids, but I doubt that they are causing too much harm and I'd just leave things as they are.
My father-in-law once mistook woolly aphids for fungi and managed to clear a tree with copper sprays.
If the variety of apple tree shown in the picture was particularly susceptible to canker, it would have died long ago from canker getting into those galls and woolly aphid feeding wounds.

I would use woolly-aphid resistant rootstocks or canker-resistant apple varieties for any future planting of apple trees - rootstocks MM106 or MM111 were bred specifically for resistance to woolly aphids and that resistance is passed on to the variety grafted onto the rootstock. But resistance does not mean immunity. My Ashmead's Kernel MM106, Discovery MM106 and Laxton Superb MM106 had a few small WAA colonies this year at the site of last year's pruning cuts.

HTH

FB

[srodders]

I had very similar those on the old trees in my back garden - I put it down to the extensive colonies of wooly aphid on them. The trees still bore fruit OK but I have now chopped down the 2 apple and 2 pear and am going to wait a season before replacing with 2 apple, 2 pear and 2 plum elsewhere in the garden. Cob nuts will be planted where the apples/pears were as they say to leave 10 years before replanting same species in the same place.