This year has been pretty much a bust for my apple trees (in Camas, WA). The wet spring led to super scabby leaves and fruit. More than half the fruit dropped off my main tree throughout the summer. In another thread Viron said "the leaves on everything look …bad. It’s as if the foliage couldn’t support a crop and can barely support the tree/s!". That is what I am seeing as well. In fact my main tree seemed to drop many of its leaves mid-summer and sprouted a bunch of new ones. I have a crab apple tree as well and it did in fact drop nearly all of its leaves then re-grew new ones. So it actually looks pretty good now, but it has no fruit (first time that has ever happened).
I do have one apple tree (that I grew from seed) that seems to be unaffected except the number of apples is low. But my two main producers look terrible.
On top of that, my 70+ year old Winter Banana apple tree broke in half in the winter winds. I cut it just below the break, hoping it might sprout from the trunk, but that did not happen, so it is toast. I did salvage a few scions and grafted them to my other trees. I think a couple of those worked so I do have a remnant from it (for sentimental reasons).
I have also been looking for acorns from Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana) to use for a habitat restoration project in the area. I have done this for several years so I have certain trees I visit which have produced many acorns in the past. But so far I have found exactly 6 acorns from these trees. In previous years I have found hundreds from these same trees. I know that oaks do not produce the same amount of acorns each year (they are on a 3 year cycle or something like that) but I have never been totally skunked when looking for acorns. I know there are many wild creatures that depend on these acorns so if this is a widespread phenomenon I wonder what impact it will have on them. I am guessing that the wet/long spring messed with oak pollination or something. Has anyone else noticed fewer Oregon White Oak acorns this year?
‘Funny,’ after I read the following, “This year has been pretty much a bust for my apple trees (in Camas, WA). The wet spring led to super scabby leaves and fruit. More than half the fruit dropped off my main tree throughout the summer†– I thought ‘Wow’ – just like me!
...yup, missing crops on consistently producing trees… I’ve not looked for acorns, though there are fortunately many mature native oaks in the vicinity, but the (tall) Oregon Grape has done extremely well and appears to be feeding many birds, the Swanson’s thrush being the main beneficiary.
I’ve also got a good crop of ‘Hardy kiwi,’ with a moderate crop of the much larger Fuzzy kiwi. My pears fared better than the apples for some unknown (to me) reason… Plum and prune crops were poor. As mentioned, I can handle a bad fruit year but when it appears to be adversely affecting the trees - I worry.
My Fuyu Persimmon trees look week, too. Though persimmons set fruit late, actually pushing new leaf growth as conservatively as the surrounding oaks, something’s wrong – and I hope it’s only the ultra-wet spring weather…
Haven’t bothered to set up my apple press… and had to let some friends know I’ve got no excess apples this year for their canning project. I do have a friend in a local community with a half-decent crop of apples …but she’d bought the trees from a nursery specializing in ‘upper Midwest apples’ and they’re not that good, and she didn’t record the varieties… beautiful trees, though early insipid apples.
Anyone else dealing with similar conditions 
I have a Prima apple that had very little scab and set a huge crop (from the same P R I line mentioned above). The apples have been making Excellent pie. I "footied" several of the apples and those came out pristine and perfect. The rest were badly riddled by apple maggot. My Golden russet was a mess in comparison, with low fruit set and scabby apples and foilage. The Prima's ripened in early Sept which seems about normal, maybe a week late. For those of you with winter pears, I am trying balloon bagging my Comice pears in the fridge for a month as suggested in this forum, I will let you know how that experiment turns out. That pear tree had some scab and very low fruit set (about a dozen), but the fruit looked good.
cheers,
Laura
The Western Cascade Fruit Society up in the Puget Sound area in Washington also had several people note the same results.....we were absolutely devastated, for example, with our Italian prune plums....which ordinarily is a good crop for us but this year it became as hard to find a good tree loaded with the prune plums as it has been to scout out the proverbial "BigFoot" creature here in the Northwest.....just couldn't find em anywhere.
The "good" side of this is we seemed a little less burdened by the codling moth.....not perfect, by any means....even with the foot sox.....even maybe with kaolin soaked footies.....we didn't have perfect control but the weather may have inhibited some of the bugs ....as well as the fruit in this unusual year.
In Canby, I have had a perfectly good apple year. Only Queen Cox has shown any problems, and she does every year. Most of my apples are disease resistant varieties.
Fuyu Persimmons are only recently beginning to blush with some orange. I don't know how that will play out.
My usually reliable Bartlett Pear has almost no fruit this year.
Japanese Plums, more Brown Rot than usual, and less fruit.
Blackberries, peaches, euro plums, figs all did fine.
Idyllwild
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jafar
Marsha H
Viron
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