My old apple tree

[TrixC]

Thanks to everyone who offered their thoughts on my tree. I had a go at making a batch of lemon verbena jelly overnight, perhaps I will post about it in the preserving section of the forum. It came out quite well although was quite low yielding, four 300mL jars from about 3kg of windfalls. Really delicious though!

[nickdub]

You can prune around now or you could have done it a few weeks ago. The general reason is that pruning in winter when the leaves are off means the tree will make a lot of new growth to compensate for what its lost, but because you have a mature tree you don't want the new growth so it's better to prune in summer instead. The plan of campaign would be to take out any damaged or diseased branches first, then have a look to see if there was any point in taking out any others too eg to let more light and air into the rest of the tree.

Being a fundamentally lazy person, if it was my tree I'd just let it get on with things in peace as long as it was producing a reasonable amount of usable fruit - but then my garden looks a lot like a wilderness, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

[BeatriceCallan]

I think you should keep it. It's so old one that it's really problematic to take care of it. I am sure it gives you a lot of advantages too, for example, the shape that it gives should be really big. You can find a use for apples if it's too bad, use them as manure for the.