Bramley Apple Tree

[Holly Daze]

Hi, can anyone advise me.. I was so pleased that this year I had a lot of apples forming on my tree. It has never really produced much. I’ve had it about ten years. It is one of the shorter varieties of Bramley. All was looking good, had some June drop and also removed some extra apples so that there were only a couple per spur. Now suddenly brown bruises the size of 20 p pieces have appeared. Any ideas? I treated the tree to winter wash in January. I didn’t use a grease band though. I’ve tried to water when necessary. It is planted in the lawn but has a very large circle of soil around it. Any advice would be gladly received.

[ameno]

A picture would help, but it sounds like it's probably brown rot. It's a fungal disease that can affect any tree fruit. If left longer, you'll find that the brown patches develop white/grey spots in concentric circles.
Brown rot generally doesn't just infect fruit out of nowhere, though (especially not hard fruit like apples). It gets into pre-existing damage, usually cause by insects or birds. Coddling moth or other larvae are the usual culprit. If you cut open an affected fruit you will probably find evidence of larva damage (tunnels and insect poo).
If it is brown rot you should remove and bin all affected fruit. It will only spread further, otherwise.

[Holly Daze]

Hi, That sounds horrible. Any way I can prevent this from happening again in the future? Photo attached.

[ameno]

Ah, that isn't brown rot. Brown rot is usually darker brown, usually in neat-ish circles not those irregular blobs like that, and most importantly is never sunken like that is.

I've looked up the damage and I'm pretty sure I know what that actually is, though (although I've never seen it on my apples before): it's sun scorch. It's caused by intense sunlight on the fruit killing patches of it. The fruit is essentially sunburnt, however the burnt patches won't recover. I get sun scorch on my blackcurrants if it's very sunny just as they are starting to ripen, but I've never had it on other fruit.
Consider how hot it was last week, I guess it's not that surprising you might get sun scorch if the tree is in full sun.
It's unlikely to happen again in another year unless we get another heat wave, but if we do get some very sunny weather you might want to consider throwing some shade netting over the tree.

As for what to do with your affected fruit, the sun scorch itself will not spread (unless we get some more very sunny and hot weather), so you might consider just leaving them on the tree and hoping the fruit continue to ripen. However the brown patches are dead tissue, which means that it is now easier to actual rots to get into those patches and then rot the rest of the fruit. Also, because they have such a large area of dead tissue they will not grow any larger now, and will instead just start ripening as-is on the tree.
If it were me I would probably start gradually picking the damaged ones, starting with the worst affected, and use them for cooking (they are cooking apples, after all, so they should be fine even under-ripe). You can just cut out the bad bits and use the rest.

[Holly Daze]

Thank you so much Ameno. The tree does actually get full sun all day long. I feel a lot better now. Will do as you suggest.

[Holly Daze]

Actually, I’ve just checked and all the damage was on the apples facing the sun! Thanks again.