Fruit trees....I need advice

betterbargains4u

I have recently moved into a house with various fruit trees, ans I know nothing about them at all!!
I was hoping that I was going to have lovely apples, pears and plums to eat..give away..store..freeze etc, but it does not look good.
My problems are listed below.

• My eating apples are turning red...but are very, very small and are dropping off the trees or are rotting whilst still on the tree. Is it time to pick them?
• My cooking apples are also very small and are also suffering the same fate as the eating apples....dropping off the tree or turning rotten.
• My pears and plums are very, very small and are just not getting any bigger and not ripening.

Any advice, you could give me, would be much appreciated.

Volcano

Sometimes fruit trees just reach the end of their useful life and become unproductive (so said the man that chopped down my old apple tree). How mature are the trees?

betterbargains4u

Volcano wrote:

Sometimes fruit trees just reach the end of their useful life and become unproductive (so said the man that chopped down my old apple tree). How mature are the trees?

Thanks for that. Even though it is not what I wanted to hear!!
I really don't know how old the trees are. The house is about 25 years old...so I suppose the trees are younger than that...but don't know how much younger.
They do look quite mature...apart from the pear tree.
Anybody else got any advice??

twink

maybe due to the hot spell they havnt had enough water, my eating apples are smaller this year, think they need feeding too, i usually use growmore, but think fruit trees and bushes need sulphate of potash in the spring, but i am not sure myself, maybe someone else will know

Lord_Gardener

It's a lack of water and wasp's causing the major problems at the moment - I'm seeing a lot of this on my travels. Mature trees should cope but will shed fruit/ leaves and the odd branch or two to help it survive. You could try thinning out the fruit - removing 1 in 3 - ensuring all diseased/attacked fruit is removed which will help fruit size and reduce stress on the tree. It's likely that you will need to prune your trees at some stage but not now! Don't prune apple/pear tree's until winter and leave the plum until early next summer (May) to avoid silver leaf disease.

BlondeHeadOn

We have cherry and plum trees, and the fruit they produce does vary from year to year. Our oldest apple tree seems to have an 'off' year every other year now, so one bad year and then one fantastic year. This year is it's 'good' year - masses of apples but they are smaller than usual. This is almost certainly due to the hot and dry weather down in the south.

I wouldn't give up on the trees yet - feed them as other posters have said and see what happens next year.