My neighbor has apples. When I brought in early pears I would have large crops and I brought in codling moth to his few apple trees. As of the last four years we are fine. The only difference now is I thin 90% of my early pears and I have found good nesting of paper wasps in my shed. Since then Ed has had no problems what-so-ever on his but my later pears which ripen with his apples get a little hit on my side so they are still there. I have seen research on using pear compounds in traps to attract male and female moths, so I'm going to keep it up.

Sour Cherries! I have two trees that I've had for two years...they get badly infected with black knot in early spring and then leaf spot in summer. Neem oil cures the leaf spot for them, but this spring I had to saw them down from 4 to 2 feet because of the black knot. I'm definitely hitting them with some copper fungicide this winter. Oh, then the deer usually hit them once or twice if I don't have them protected in rabbit fencing.

Chicago Hardy Fig Just bought one this year and it's supposed to be one of the only figs that can be grown zone 6. I've read that they can be planted in the ground, but the branches may die back, which isn't a big deal to me, but this one hasn't grown at all since I planted it. It gets plenty of sun and I've watered it enough to get its roots established. No growth. If this one fails I'll probably just stick to growing figs in pots.

Golden Delicious Apple Who would've though, right? Had mine for 3 years now and I've found that it gets badly affected by powdery mildew. I've had to cut back so many branches that it's basically the same size as when I planted it 3 summers ago. I started using neem oil on it this year and it seems to have done the trick. I'll see how it goes, but as Lee Reich says, apples are probably the hardest fruit to grow east of the Rockies.

Not sure. They were unlabeled at the nursery, but I'm guessing probably north star or montmorency. The black knot seems to go away. But that's only after I remove the affected branches, so I don't want to keep doing that. On the other hand I don't want to just give up already.

What makes the quince you have so difficult to grow? I'm curious because I planted a Texas Red Scarlet Japanese quince in the spring and I want to know what I may be up against. I haven't noticed much in the way of problems so far, except it seems to be a slow grower. Also, since I believe this was a cultivar grown for ornamental purposes, I'm not sure if it's self-pollinating. What, in your opinion would be a good cross-pollinator?

I forgot to mention in my first post that I've also had problems with meadow voles. Starting from a year ago up to now, they've hit my Nanking cherries, blueberries, blackberries, plums, hops and quince. I hate those little things with a passion. I've had a lot of success with poisonous bait chunks by breaking them into small pieces and dropping them down in their holes. Sometimes though I'm really surprised with how many times I need to drop more and more bait into the same holes. They reproduce by the hundreds!

Viron:

Good post and good use of color matching. With your wet soil I thought blueberry would like that. I once lived next to an area of land in east Bellevue WA called "the greenbelt" that was undeveloped due to the high water table. The land is leased for agriculture of blueberry and has been for a long time. There are elevated public trails I used to walk between the blueberry fields which were always wet so I your problem. Although it might be a possibility all the plants were grafted on a more water tolerant form of blueberry.

I see you have listed plums as more favorable to your conditions than cherry. That would be right because plum roots are in most cases known to be more favorable to the condition.

If you tried cherry for so long I suppose it would behoove you to look for a solution about grafting cherry on a plum for water tolerance and then I would go for a plum rootstock by the trade name "z-stem". Floyd Zaiger genetics holds a propagation patent on it as one of the first ever understock plums to serve with cherry. You will find by reading the patent that the plum is prunus myrobalan. You will also find books of grafting describing understocks and listing myrobalan plum sustaining water better than other kinds of prunus.

There are even more reasons that I list myro plum better than any other thing, one of which is long term bacterial protection (PSS). (see under sub-heading Plant Resistance & choosing resistant cherry interstem) This previous link and the threat therein will give you a good idea why cherry trees are not commercialized west of the Cascades. Oregon plant pathologist Ken Johnson helped educate me concerning this and how it was affecting my trees by sending me the results of big dollars spent in Oregon over a fifty year period. Even more studies are listed at the bottom section of same (PSS) page.

Putting two and two together and the recent invention of a plum root that is tested to be good with cherry, and with the evidence of studies in our jurisdictions (high rain high bacteria, your soil), it seems that you and the company should sign a license to have these tested on your land.

But for you Viron you will have to do something more 100% about those vole populations you told us about several years ago first because damage to trees reduce tree health and the health of the tree will become the very most important part to keep up in order sustain full natural abilities for the tree to wall off this bacteria, which also applies to fungus infections for that matter.

Thanks John S for that previous compliment " title="Embarassed" /> , and thanks again Viron for a good post.

Rupert H (Rooney)
west of the Cascades

Last that I know of only Dave Wilson nursery in California sells cherrys like that. But you can only get the "z-stem" plum as the interstock and "citation" as the rootstock which is another Zaiger developement in itself which has 50% peach x 50% myrobalan plum breeding in it. I think the citation would be a great one to stand in place of z-stem because it seems resistant like z-stem based on eveidence about my first (frost) peach I bought grafted on citation by Biringer wholesale nursery since it was still under a patent at the time. I was not very good in some years covering my peach for the winter months so the disease had taken only everything above the graft.

That happened a long time ago and I then ordered more citation stocks from Raintree. They grew for 10 years with red peach looking shaped leaves. They were healthy all that time up to the 10th year I decided to graft beach plum at six feet. Beach plum bloomed for a few years and would have had plums but they were not self fruitful like my frost peach was. It then died but like my old peach the citation was always good right up to the graft.

I tried to establish more because the 17 year plant patent expired and because I was having trouble getting more of citation from Raintree at the time. So I hacked the citation but no root shoots started when I decided to pull up root sections to graft and never got around to that.