Ep. 270: Falling for Apples | #GoodGrowing

Ken Johnson: 00:03

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Ken Johnson, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension, coming to you today from Jacksonville, Illinois. And on today's podcast, we are gonna be talking about apples. More specifically, what we should be doing in the fall with our apple trees. If you've got some, you're gonna be visiting an orchard, hopefully, some useful information for you this week.

Ken Johnson: 00:25

And you know I'm not doing this by myself. I am joined as always every single week my horticulture educator Emily Swihart in Milan, Illinois, if you're in Illinois, or Milan, if you're in Italy.

Emily Swihart: 00:38

Hi, Ken. Yeah, I'm in Illinois, solidly in Illinois. Loving the weather we're having in Illinois. This is quite the change. Most, I mean from the whole summer.

Emily Swihart: 00:47

We've cooled off, the humidity has dropped, it is apple picking season and pumpkin spice season and I am a fan of both flavors. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about apples. They're such a heritage plant. I grew up growing them, eating them. Know, now there's so many different flavor profiles and uses.

Emily Swihart: 01:09

It's just like... I'm excited to have our guest joining us to share his expertise because he certainly is our expert in Extension and now is the time to talk Apples. So how about we welcome Grant?

Grant McCarty: 01:26

Hello, thanks for having me.

Ken Johnson: 01:29

Yes. Thanks for coming on.

Emily Swihart: 01:30

So it's nice to welcome Grant. Now, Grant, I just I just shared some, secrets about me, which I am both pumpkin spice and team apple flavor for the fall. Do you have a favorite? Because you're a specialty crops educator in Extension.

Grant McCarty: 01:49

So it's hard, right? I mean, like my... I started off in specialty crops with a lot of tomato and pepper work. And so I got really into like heirloom tomatoes and and that was kind of my area I really focused on. And then once I kind of moved into an area of fruit production because there's so much demand up here in Northern Illinois, it then meant, okay, let's let's get more into apples.

Grant McCarty: 02:12

And so you know I still grow pumpkins in the backyard. I'm not like you know Mr. Joe handing our specialist that has a lot of pumpkins but I still am traveling or playing around with some of the backyard. I like a Jaradale blue pumpkin compared to the orange pumpkins myself that others like. But yeah, at this point I, you know, Labor Day hits it's apples, it's apple cider donuts, It's apple trees.

Grant McCarty: 02:40

It's orchard. It is intensely apples for Labor Day to maybe it even goes all the to New Year's Eve. I don't even know. My fridge is packed of apples at this point because I have to try new ones that I'm forgetting. My family is telling me not to bring any more apples home because they've had enough, and we're only a month into what is gonna be a six month journey or if you will for everyone with apples.

Grant McCarty: 03:05

So, yeah, I would say it's an apples. I'm an apple guy.

Ken Johnson: 03:10

That's the correct answer. So, you know.

Emily Swihart: 03:14

Well, you can't put peanut butter on a pumpkin. So I suppose apples are delicious also. Mhmm. I

Ken Johnson: 03:21

mean, I guess you could, but it's a little easier with an Apple.

Emily Swihart: 03:26

Sure. Okay. We've already gotten a little bit off the rails here. Ken, why don't you kick us off with our our questions and maybe pull us back in Yes. AppleTalk.

Ken Johnson: 03:38

Alright. So so this year, we had some late frost, which impacted a lot of places. So how did the, the the 2026 frost this year impact this year's crop? And and what kind of effects may that have next year?

Grant McCarty: 03:54

Yeah. So in Northern Illinois, where I'm based right on the Wisconsin Illinois state line, we have a lot of orchards that are commercial scale, you pick orchards. Of course, we also have homeowners too, backyard production is occurring as well. And for the most part, some of these orchards are really able to withstand this kind of wave of frost on a weekly basis during the bloom period of say middle of April to maybe the first or second week of May. But then there were some orchards that just couldn't do it.

Grant McCarty: 04:24

Was that their scale was in a way where they were really impacted by these frost and freeze events. But there also are larger orchards that actually have a fan. And so folks may have actually visited orchards and seen these big wind turbines and you just are thinking, what is this? And that's actually used as frost protection. And so it's bringing the wind down into the orchard to provide say three to four degrees of protection for those blooms.

Grant McCarty: 04:51

Around say 26 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit we start to see some frost damage which could in turn basically kill the fruit for the season. If I've got a wind turbine it's kind of bringing that air down, now I'm actually kind of having a bit more of threshold with it too. So what that has translated into is that there are some orchards that have nothing, there are some orchards for the season, there are some orchards that lost maybe 15 to 20% of the crop, and then there are some orchards that were fine because they had figured out they had used the wind turbines to address this. So those orchards in 2027 that didn't have any crop this year still had the spray. They still had the spray for insects and diseases and other stuff Now they're expecting this huge bumper crop in 2027 which is going to require a lot more thinning than they previously maybe have done.

Grant McCarty: 05:44

The other thing I think that was really interesting here was that this was a very national issue. Almost all the orchards in Pennsylvania lost their entire apple crop. There were spots of Michigan that lost their apple crop too. And one of the things that really emerged, but I think is relevant whether you're a backyard grower or a commercial grower is that the old images of you know temperature thresholds and growth stages for apples it's really based on older apple varieties. And so if you're growing some of these newer ones you may find that the old photo may say 90% of the blossoms are lost at 28 degrees Fahrenheit for this many hours and yet because you're growing a newer variety you may have a much different temperature threshold.

Grant McCarty: 06:28

So that's really provided a bit of an educational framing to really think about frost and freeze events going forward because we also know it's going to keep happening too.

Emily Swihart: 06:39

That's fascinating that the newer varieties, like something with genetics and the selection, might be altering some of those tolerances. So, well, that'll be fascinating to watch.

Grant McCarty: 06:53

Yeah, and I think they'll do more research with it and then we'll actually have better information too.

Emily Swihart: 06:58

Sure, sure. There are a lot coming onto the market, a lot of new cultivators. There's just like an explosion. You think that research might be able to keep up and be able to, or is there just so many different cultivars available? Are they gonna have to just pick some, some of the more popular ones to start?

Grant McCarty: 07:16

We know a lot about Honeycrisp. We know a lot about Gala. Like, those are the two that when you look at some of the guides, we can basically say this is the right rootstock to choose for both of those. There's been enough research on that. Emerging issues with both of those two like Bitter Pit on Honeycrisp and others, we know a lot about them.

Grant McCarty: 07:37

But yeah when you're talking about right some of these newer ones, Cosmic Crisp as a Washington exclusive variety or some of other New York ones, They're coming in, they're flooding them, they may be flooding the market, they're finding a lot of trees and we don't always have a lot of information about how they grow or what they will do long term. So it's still one of those things that like the older varieties that we're familiar with like the Fuji, the Granny Smith, the Pink Clay, and others. We have good amount of research but we don't have the complete story about them. Some of the newer ones that are coming in the market too are still so exclusive to commercial growers compared to homeowners that could get access to them.

Emily Swihart: 08:20

Got it. One more question before we move on. You had mentioned about thinning. Could you just for you like are new to apple growing backyard gardeners or just people that don't maybe know what that term means or what that looks like? Could you just briefly explain that to folks?

Grant McCarty: 08:38

Yeah, so on apples you have kind of a cluster of fruits that will develop and they're typically on a spur. And so the spur is this little piece off of the limb and it lives say five to seven years and it will provide the blooms every single season. There's a king fruit which is always the biggest flower in the center of this cluster of flowers. And so a lot of times if I'm a commercial orchard I will use a chemical thinner and during certain times of that season usually after pollination maybe end of May June when you have little small fruitlets developing, a chemical thinner will be applied and it will basically kill off the smaller ones but leave the biggest one. If I was a homeowner and I wanted to do this it's typically easier just to the clippers.

Grant McCarty: 09:23

So you wait until everything's been pollinated, you come in if you can and you're just kind of taking clippers and leaving the big king fruit. So that's the main thinning process. What some commercial growers now do is kind of more of a pistol thinning when it comes to the blossoms. It's earlier before really even pollination and fruit lit set has started. And that's a whole complicated equation, the mathematical formula like, but frankly for some of the growers of the commercial scale that have will have a huge apple crop in 2027, they may actually need to examine both of those things.

Grant McCarty: 10:04

And chemical thinning for commercial orchard may happen a couple of times at the start of the season too because they just can't get everything off of the trees. And some trees are just more prone to a lot of heavy fruit load too and able to withstand some of the chemical thinners and clippers.

Emily Swihart: 10:22

And that thinning leads to better fruit that's left on the tree as

Grant McCarty: 10:25

well as

Emily Swihart: 10:25

protecting the trees

Grant McCarty: 10:27

from damage under the wood. That's exactly right.

Emily Swihart: 10:31

Thank you. Back to our previously scheduled questions. So okay, now that fall is here, we're into October right now, what should we be doing with our apple trees? Like I want to kind of shift away from the commercial growers. Know, like we've got a lot of home orchard owners or single apple tree owners.

Grant McCarty: 10:50

Yeah.

Emily Swihart: 10:50

They're just gonna wanna know what to do. So that's kind of the frame through which we're gonna be asking our questions. We're like, what should we be doing now that it's fall with these apple trees?

Grant McCarty: 10:59

So the best piece of advice right now, depending on where you're at, I mean we've had a lot of rain the last week or two up in Illinois, but if you could keep the leaves on the tree for as long as possible, that should be your goal. So if you're entering periods that are really dry, it may mean that you need to irrigate. The longer that these leaves stay on that tree, the better they're going to be as they enter dormancy as they enter, as they're faced with some winter conditions that maybe could lead to winter damage and just even kind of the overall rebalancing of that tree, you will. The longer the leaves stay the better. That's not always possible, we know, but that would be one thing to really look at.

Grant McCarty: 11:41

The other thing of course is that we need to see if we can close insects and disease cycles from next year. So any dropped fruit, any dropped leaves they need to move away from that canopy so that they can't just repopulate in the spring. This is especially true for things like apple scab and some of our other insects that could become a challenge in 2027. Those tend to be the two that I kind of look at. You could start to do some light pruning maybe mid December wherever you're located.

Grant McCarty: 12:13

If there was a week or two that it was very consistent cold temperatures like in the 20s or 30s, but you also want to make sure that you're not about to encounter a giant drop in temperature either or a big swing. Really this is very light pruning so and this is not going to be your intensive or width type pruning going on in December. So those are my three things to kind of you know start right now, next month keep doing this and then towards the end of the year consider that. We don't really see much nutritional issues when it comes to apples. Know sometimes we even just say just put the tree out.

Grant McCarty: 12:50

I mean obviously in Extension we would love you to get the soil test before you put out any pernod crop, but sometimes with apples they could tolerate a wide range.

Emily Swihart: 13:00

When folks are cleaning up their orchards, what do they do with fallen fruit that might have some disease? Do we compost it or do we just trash it?

Grant McCarty: 13:08

Yeah, I mean I would try to trash it. I'm always hesitant with the composting situation because I just don't think, obviously if you have a good true compost and you're hitting the right temperature threshold, that's one thing. If they're just being piled up and rotting nearby, that's an entirely different thing.

Ken Johnson: 13:26

Alright. So for those people that are fortunate to have apples or or maybe you're visiting a an orchard. So when it comes to picking apples, how do you know when they're ripe?

Grant McCarty: 13:39

Well, a lot of times it's a little bit of like a twist. Right? You're kind of grabbing the apple. You should be able to just delicately twist it off of the tree. You will also tend to see a bit more of a color change happening.

Grant McCarty: 13:49

So there's a bit more of like a yellowish type background we'll typically see with certain apples. It's not always true for everything right if it's like a really prominent red apple. But this is also why it's on the side because there'll be a sides in apples. It's very difficult to know when a Granny Smith is mature because the flavor can be very wide ranging. It's the end of October typically when it needs to be harvested and you're not getting that color like you would some of the other apples.

Grant McCarty: 14:14

So sometimes I this way here there are orchards that are selling Granny Smith really early because the commercial orchards because they can't tell if it's ready or not. But if you have other apples in your trees, if you cut the apple and you can see where the seeds are, you want that dark coloration to say that the seeds are mature. That brownish blackish color would also be stating that the tree is ready to go. A lot of times the tree will ripen unevenly, so don't expect, okay I've taken one apple here, let's harvest everything. It is that there can be some unevenness with it.

Grant McCarty: 14:50

I would say a lot of the ones that are getting more sunlight will be ripening much sooner than some of the ones that are a little bit more shaded. When I've been with commercial orchards and just walking around and they'll be like oh I think this apple is ready and they just grab the apple off the tree and they eat it. And like okay it's ready to sell this week. So don't forget about the taste test right? Like that's a clear indicator that this is ready to go or it's not.

Grant McCarty: 15:14

And the final thing that I also suggest is that if you are growing apples and you're growing varieties that are similar to other to commercial orchards near you, look at their harvest calendar. They always put a calendar up on their social media, and that can give you an idea of if your apples are ready to go or not. It's not always clear, but that can at least kind of give you some guidance with it too.

Ken Johnson: 15:42

And you kind of had to do this. Is there a technique to picking apples? You just go out there and just yank them off and Yeah, whatever happens

Grant McCarty: 15:50

I would start, I would yank and then look at the seeds if you want to do the taste test. Just combine it with a lot of stuff. If you're harvesting an apple in July and it's not a summer apple, that's obviously not ready. Sometimes harvest runs a week ahead of time too. So keep that in mind.

Ken Johnson: 16:09

Alright. And then what about apples on the ground? You know, sometimes you hear that they're... They can be used for applesauce, apple butter, things like that. If you've got, I guess, in a home situation, apples on the ground, should we be picking and consuming those?

Grant McCarty: 16:22

In the home situation, I think it's up to you. You know, I think it does kind of get back to just food safety and also how is this going to be preserved, whether it's going to be fresh eating or cooking. You know, not the food nutrition educator here, so I'm not going to give too much guidance on food preservation. I will tell you though, as someone who has made a lot of apple butter in my life, it's usually better off the tree than it is off the ground and it's usually mixture of different apples. So, you need sweets and other ones in there.

Grant McCarty: 16:56

Yet again, I'm not a food nutrition educator. Just a consumer.

Emily Swihart: 17:02

And we have those on staff and so folks who

Grant McCarty: 17:04

have questions,

Emily Swihart: 17:05

can reach out and we'll connect you with the people that know how to use the food that we're growing. Yeah. I'll just add sidebar. Will, when you say like when they can come off the tree easily when you're picking them, you're picking them in the middle of summer, I have fond but probably shameful memories of yanking apples off of a tree with our apple picker because they were too high and that's fun to use for kids and they were not summer ripe apples. We were doing damage and falling in love with nature at the same time.

Emily Swihart: 17:38

But oh my goodness. Know now. So we do better now. So if you have- I mean, lot of our trees, and maybe next year people will be in this situation where they have an abundant crop, like so many apples that they want to use now, but maybe not do like food butter, like food preservation, but just try to keep the apples whole and store them for like a little longer. Do you have any tips or tricks for how do you store apples and so you can use them kind of later in the following months?

Grant McCarty: 18:13

So refrigerator temperature plays a big role. So 33 to Fahrenheit. You also want pretty good high humidity and you also really want to inspect the apples that are going into cold storage too just to make sure that there's not anything that maybe is a cut or a bruise that could leave release ethylene or other things. The other thing to look at is that there are some apples that will have good storage versus poor storage. There will be some that will have a much longer storage of four to six months.

Grant McCarty: 18:46

There are some that might be two to three months. So looking up that is really important here too. I will say that most of the late season apples tend to have better storage ability. So as we look at towards the end of October, some of the ones that will be coming on board like the Granny Smith, like Evercrisp, which is a very popular Midwestern Apple Improvement Association one, they can have much better storage than some of the earlier season ones. Honeycrisp I think is about two to three months.

Grant McCarty: 19:16

In Northern Oil you're picking that one about Labor Day, last week of August. So a storage of Honeycrisp might go to November 1 or one or two weeks in November with it.

Emily Swihart: 19:29

And you can store the different types together. It's just important to keep track, like in the same kind of refrigerator. You would just kind of keep track of which ones to use sooner.

Grant McCarty: 19:39

I would, yeah. And you know, you see some designs where folks just kind of lay things out in some of the crisper drawers or just kind of allow them to kind of do layers of newspaper in other ways. Those are all fine. I think the purpose is just to make sure that they're not really sitting on top of one another in a way that could allow for them to bruise much easier and then to just increase the spoilage of them.

Emily Swihart: 20:02

Yeah. Yeah. And so you talk about like making sure they're not damaged and the release of ethylene. Like there is an adage like one bad apple can spoil a bunch. Like do you want to kind of speak to that, like where that comes from and that why ethylene is, you know, some of these gases that the apples are producing is a concern that we should know about.

Grant McCarty: 20:24

Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that you may see in your backyard orchards or your community garden orchards is that there's a lot of these late season fruit rots that will show up on the tree. And so you know these imperfect fruits that are great that you love may actually have some internal rots beginning to occur once they're coming off the tree. And so that's kind of hard to know in a way, right? Because you're just like well this is a fruit I want to keep, there's a little bit of a spot but I can still eat it.

Grant McCarty: 20:53

That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be good for storage, then it may actually start to speed up this process breaking down. And so yes, I mean, that release of ethylene for entire crop that you're putting storage is going to increase the spoilage on that entire. Crop. So it's hard. Obviously, it's very difficult, and you want to be just very mindful of looking at the apples that are coming in while also not being maybe too excessive, if you will.

Grant McCarty: 21:23

I guess it depends on what your goal is, though.

Ken Johnson: 21:29

Right. So we we talked a little bit about orchard management, already. So, you know, making sure we're cleaning up things like that. You kinda wanna go through maybe some of the different pests that we'd be managing when we're doing that this fall.

Grant McCarty: 21:45

Yeah, and this is something both of you all can speak to too. I'm not just going be the sole fruit tree guy here. Scab is one of the biggest issues. Scab is one that we certainly know it overwinters on the leaves. We certainly know that those leaves stay on in the winter and in the spring they will just move straight up into the tree.

Grant McCarty: 22:07

If your tree has some disease resistance to scab that may not be too much of a concern, but that could still be a concern of just any sort of keeping that disease cycle going. This would also be a time to maybe see if you've had any fire blight strike on the apple trees that you know shepherd's hook that shows up with fire blight is pretty noticeable. Depending on when you see that you may decide to want to remove it then and there. That So wouldn't be something that you would see on the ground, you would actually see in the tree itself. Those are the two that I kind of talk a lot about is there's the apple scab and the fire blight.

Grant McCarty: 22:46

From the insect perspective these are a lot of the things like the punkaculio, even some other stink bugs, all of them it's hard to know how they're going to overwinter. In most cases they aren't necessarily going to do too much overwintering but I would still be really cautious of any sort of advantage that you could give them. But what have you all seen with the insects Ken? I mean Ken as the insect person and Emily let's bring you in too. I don't want to discount.

Emily Swihart: 23:20

No. You're fine. Ken is our expert on insects.

Ken Johnson: 23:25

Yeah. And, you know, like coddling moth, things like, you know, make sure you've got... If you've apples on the ground, getting them off of there so they do have insects in them. You're getting them out of the orchard. I'd say a bit of things.

Ken Johnson: 23:36

And like you mentioned the, the fruit rots. If you've got those mummies in the tree, make sure you're... So if you get... If the diseased apples, they'll they'll shrivel up, call them mummies, get those out of your trees so that are not reinfecting the following year or if they're on the ground too, so not reinfecting your plants.

Grant McCarty: 23:58

Yeah. I think that that is one of the key tools to really having a successful backyard orchard is closing these insect and disease cycles because it's really hard to address them in the season I think for a lot of homeowners and it's very sometimes intimidating to you know have a bit of a spray program in the backyard that for fruit trees especially apples almost requires in order to have really good apples. I know there's been some push towards bagging apples and some folks have had some pretty good success with that. There's a lot of Ziploc bags but that could be one way that you could reduce the amount of spraying programs that you may have to really implement. But these are not easy crop, as both of you know.

Emily Swihart: 24:48

Well, I'll just like speak to just kind of the exhaustion that everyone has. Like by the time we should be doing this, these activities, like the cleanup and we're heading into colder months, you know, like, they're busy months with holidays and, you know, just life is always kind of, you know, going fast. And so it can be, easy to let it go. Like, I've done it myself. Like, you know, you show up and and the tree is, you know, leafing out and I've got mummies still hanging on, you know, from the previous year.

Emily Swihart: 25:17

So, like, I guess I'm I'm just trying to encourage everyone to, like, dig deep and go do this cleanup because it is, sanitation is really key when you're trying to grow a good crop of apples. And if you didn't get apples this year, this year might be... Or you got a few of them. This might be the year to really do some of that sanitation because next year you're setting yourself up for hopefully, really, like, bumper crop. But it does take a little gumption to get there sometimes, but do it.

Emily Swihart: 25:48

So

Ken Johnson: 25:51

So one more orchard manager. Maybe not this year depending on where you're at in state, oftentimes, we'll get questions like, I've got... My apples are really small this year. Is there any particular reason why that may happen?

Grant McCarty: 26:06

There could be many, many reasons that you have small apples. It is it's very common for over cropping. So it is that heavy crop in 2026, light crop 2027, smaller fruit. You could have pollination issues where if they were flowering during a period of time when things were wet or weather was colder, it could be less pollination that was occurring on the fruit itself. Sometimes there's a nutrient issues.

Grant McCarty: 26:36

I don't really see that as the main culprit most of the time. There also could be water stress and then finally there could be rootstocks. So pick one, pick all and also varieties. Varieties can also do this too. I think the main culprit I see most of the time is over cropping.

Grant McCarty: 26:56

I think that is the one thing and it just gets back to you're not pruning enough. You maybe have a tree that needs to be thin. It could also be that you've gotten into a cycle where it's heavy one year, light the next year, and it just keeps going. In order to break up that cycle, you need to be consistently pruning and consistently thinning. It also could lead you to accept that too.

Grant McCarty: 27:20

Some folks have backyard orchards and they will just accept that it's heavy, heavy crop load. It's like, oh this is great in 2026 and then it's like, alright it's gonna be light next year and perfectly fine with that. But yeah, it's a lot of factors that could go into it.

Emily Swihart: 27:39

That is... I'll also just kind of speak to like that's frustrating because apples are like hair. You know, hinted at that. Like we love growing apples and we, you know, it is... We're a persistent group of folks because everybody wants to grow apples, but they they do make it difficult.

Emily Swihart: 27:55

And so appreciate the the tips. So can we plant apples now? Like, I'm a tree person on on the podcast. And like, I am saying, like, we should be planting deciduous trees primarily right now because of the extra growing season for the roots establishment, and, you know, we won't... We'll save that podcast for another day.

Emily Swihart: 28:16

But when it comes to apples, do they kind of get bunched in to that recommendation?

Grant McCarty: 28:23

You can. You can plant them now. I would say you could probably plant them maybe up until one or two weeks in November. I think the concern that you run into, not even concern, it's just availability. There's just not a lot of fall apples available to you.

Grant McCarty: 28:38

You get the email blast every once in a while that some of the main companies that people purchase fruit trees from have some available and you may find that those are the ones that you want but a lot of times you're dealing with kind of the end of the year sale, the clearance apple trees which if you find what you want is fine but a lot of times it's not like the right variety is the right rootstock or anything like that. I have planted fall apples before and been fine. I haven't seen much difference when it comes to the overall growth and the overall survivability has been fine too. And it just meant that, you know, okay, I got like six, eight months head start instead of just waiting around till the springtime with it. Yeah.

Emily Swihart: 29:25

Well, that's good news. But I guess I'll also say like you protect them the same way. Protect the trunks and keep all the critters away. Treat them like any other tree in that way. Right.

Emily Swihart: 29:35

You hinted at, you said like the root stock. It might not be the desirable root stock that you're looking for. Can you talk more about kind of rootstock? Because this is really kind of a fun... I just, I love this aspect of growing apple trees and just like the science behind it.

Emily Swihart: 29:52

So can you talk about like rootstock and dwarfing and then also the cultivar, like the mixed trees, you know, the many, many and one trees. Just the weird science of

Grant McCarty: 30:03

apple So trees, I most of the apples that we would be growing, whether your backyard, commercial, whatever are grown on rootstocks. And these rootstocks have taken, there's not many rootstocks because they take sometimes decades to develop. You may have a new rootstock every forty or fifty years. They're trying to develop a rootstock the below ground portion that basically is providing disease management, insect management. It usually is providing the dwarfing quality so the tree stays really short.

Grant McCarty: 30:37

It may also provide some winter hardiness. A lot of times ours are winter hardiness and so it then is grafted with a cultivar at a certain place and so the cultivar being your honeycress, your fuji, forth. And so that cultivar is taking on all of these qualities that that rootstock has. So it means that that rootstock is providing all the things I just kind of mentioned. It's perhaps disease management, it is that dwarfing quality where it will actually yield earlier, some are known for this.

Grant McCarty: 31:09

And anytime you're ordering trees, you will find that if it says a dwarf tree or semi dwarf tree, dwarf being eight to 10 feet typically, semi dwarf 14 to 16 feet, and then standard is twenty-twenty five. We don't really recommend standard apple trees anymore because it just is, the tree is too big. You have better options. So if I am ordering from my backyard orchard or say a community garden orchard, I wouldn't really be given a choice of rootstock. I would just say I want a dwarf tree of Fuji and they would provide that dwarf quality for me.

Grant McCarty: 31:48

They may determine a rootstock that has a good winter hardiness but I wouldn't have to actually go deep deep into rootstocks. If I'm a commercial orchard I am looking at my root stocks. I'm like okay I need bud nine which is going to provide some dwarfing quality and some winter hardiness. Maybe I do G41 or G11 which is the Geneva series that provides some disease resistance in there too. Those are all commercial decisions I have to make.

Grant McCarty: 32:16

Backyard growers, you're not having to worry about that. But that's what the rootstock is because if we are taking an apple off that tree like Honeycrisp or like I love this apple and you plant that seed, it's not true to time. It may not be anywhere true to that honeycrisp apple. It may take fifteen to twenty years to develop something, and it ends up being like a trash apple that does nothing for you. So that's why we have the grafting.

Grant McCarty: 32:44

That's how we have the rootstocks. For the multi cultivar one, we have this like mixture of different ones. Typically, you've got a mixture that should be pollinated one another. So it's designed in a way that your cross pollination needs are met compared to buying multiple, apple trees to provide that cross pollination. Obviously, you gotta be really careful because you don't wanna take out the one that is providing pollination for another one and then you're just stuck with the tree that won't be producing fruit.

Grant McCarty: 33:15

I don't have much experience with them, but I will say it's very interesting because this was really trendy for a while and then it just kind of went away. And yet now we're actually seeing it in some of our commercial orchards where they will actually have a single apple tree and have different varieties of that. So it's odd to see it kind of cycle back to a commercial space where some of these bigger commercial farms in Michigan and other places are having multi leaders with different varieties on them.

Emily Swihart: 33:47

That's interesting. Yeah, do remember being very trendy. And then I thought it had cycled out. I guess I just made the assumption it cycled out of of fashionability because maybe they weren't being as successful. But it sounds like Have

Grant McCarty: 34:01

you seen them? Or like, I I am... I don't see them too often often. Have you seen any... Yeah.

Emily Swihart: 34:04

Yeah. I saw them in catalogs.

Grant McCarty: 34:07

Yes.

Emily Swihart: 34:07

And I thought... You know, like, that was fascinating. I never made the investment. But interesting. Maybe that's another road trip, Ken.

Emily Swihart: 34:14

We just keep, like, growing our list of road trips. Need to get some of these orchards to see these multi multi cultivar trees. Very fast.

Grant McCarty: 34:21

Yeah, and I think a lot of like the Michigan is doing it some. So you can see some of that happening there. And I think parts of Canada as well.

Emily Swihart: 34:32

I'd go to either place. Yeah. Both lovely. We're talking primarily about apples in the fall, but you had hinted at and talked about cross pollination. Just remind folks, because we're talking about planting a tree, but if you're planting one apple tree, you're gonna need to think twice, right?

Emily Swihart: 34:51

Just remind everybody about that.

Grant McCarty: 34:53

Yeah, so apples require cross pollination and they require one or more cultivar flowering at the same time. So in most cases they are overlapping you know it's you rarely find that there is a if you're playing a Fuji or Gala they most likely are going to cross pollinate one another. Sometimes there's concern if you have a really early season apple and a really late season apple. Sometimes there's not as much of that overlapping of a bloom period. You could though just be like I don't care, let me just put on the crabapple.

Grant McCarty: 35:28

And so the crabapple will be the one that actually provides pollination for all of them, and they typically have a much longer blooming period than your apples do. So that's always something that is needed. There are a couple of triploid apples and they basically will not provide pollen to others. They'll take the pollen. So that's always something to just double check that you haven't bought like two two apple trees and one of them is a triploid that won't provide it.

Grant McCarty: 35:56

But I will tell you and you may you all may have experienced this too. We get questions all the time at the extension office that I've planted a row of Honeycrisp. They're eight years old. They have never produced any fruit for me. What is happening?

Grant McCarty: 36:10

It's such a common issue.

Ken Johnson: 36:12

Very common. Yep. So speaking of common questions, here's a... Here's another one that I think many of us enjoy, maybe not. So I have an old apple tree, and it has these really awesome apples.

Ken Johnson: 36:30

And you bring you bring an apple in, And can you tell me what it is?

Grant McCarty: 36:38

No. Don't bring the apples to me. Don't bring a bucket of apples. Do not do that to me or any extension office in Illinois. Maybe Chris Enroth.

Grant McCarty: 36:50

Chris Enroth isn't here. Bring all of your apples to Chris Enroth and he will tell you what those are. It's very difficult to determine cultivar names and so forth of apples. They all have similar parents, they all have similar colors and characteristics. We know that there are 16,000 known varieties of apples in North America.

Grant McCarty: 37:17

And we also know of course that not all of them are still growing, but it's a very long history of that. So I've attempted sometimes to you know have an apple come in and try to narrow it down and it's like okay it could be one of 16, right? Like that's not helping me. That's a challenge there. The other thing to kind of know is that there is some genetic testing that could be done from Washington State University with their My Apple project.

Grant McCarty: 37:48

So you could actually send in a plant sample this year, so this is actually a good time to do it. And they would do some genetic testing to see what your variety is. But, yeah, it's very difficult to narrow down that name based on just those phenotypical characteristics. I do have, like, the the big illustrated Apple book that came out, the seven volume collection. So sometimes folks will ask me about certain apples and I'll just kind of look up more information about them.

Grant McCarty: 38:19

I just heard last week in one of the classes I was teaching about a Russian apple that actually is true to type. It actually is like you plant the seed and it is very true to type. So not 100% true to type, really, really close compared to the North American apples that are not true to type. And I think that one was just based on how apples were produced in Russia, like how they're growing apples and so forth.

Ken Johnson: 38:46

Interesting. So say, you know, sometimes we'll get these, you know, I don't know what it is. You can't figure it out. So an option would be to graft that tree. Is that something you could do this time of year or want to be looking at grafting things?

Grant McCarty: 39:01

Grafting is gonna be better in the springtime. You know, you're taking off some of that, those cuttings from your winter pruning, and then you would be grafting onto your rootstock. There's a lot of different organizations and even Extension will sometimes do grafting workshops in the springtime where you can just learn that skill. I don't have that skill and I haven't developed or wanted to develop that skill, but I certainly know there's a lot of team members and others that have great experience with that it can provide some good guidance with it too.

Ken Johnson: 39:33

Sam I've done apple grafting once and I forgot about them as they were hardening off in my basement by the time I got them out. There was no way to tell if I was successful.

Grant McCarty: 39:43

No way to tell.

Emily Swihart: 39:47

Grafting, that art of it is so incredible. It's no wonder it's a limited skill because it's so intricate and delicate. Man, I've seen some folks just whiz through it. When they get good, they can go so fast. It's really neat to witness.

Emily Swihart: 40:10

Well, we've hinted that there are a whole bunch of varieties available, but are there any new ones that you're particularly excited about or favor? You said you had a whole refrigerator full of different Yeah. Different flavors. Like, you know, spill the beans. What...

Emily Swihart: 40:25

What's...

Grant McCarty: 40:25

Spill beans. What's going on? Yeah. So a lot of the newer ones coming on market the homeowner backyard grower cannot grow. They're exclusively to commercial growers sadly.

Grant McCarty: 40:36

So some of the ones like Cosmic Crisp and others that people really like are just exclusive to them. There's a whole subset also of Maya Apples, Midwestern Apple Improvement Association and these are commercial grower exclusive too. But if you're at the orchard these are just fantastic flavors. Most of them have Honeycrisp and Fuji as parents because typically you have two parents that crawls to develop this variety and even within that you may have six or seven of these Maya Apples that have the same parents and taste entirely different and are harvested entirely different times. So they've really done a great job kind of developing some of these genetics for good flavored apples to try.

Grant McCarty: 41:21

The one that a lot of growers like right now is called Evercrisp and so that's a late October apple. It's a good quality, a good color, wonderful storage ability. And so that's when we're seeing a lot with our commercial growers. There's another one called Scruffy, which has a little bit more of like a kind of a yellow brownish discoloration to it but still kind of a good color, a good flavor to it. The backyard apple I really like is ambrosia.

Grant McCarty: 41:50

I think ambrosia is a really solid apple. I think that not enough people know about it or grow it and yet it's found at grocery stores. You can find the fruit trees pretty regularly and what's interesting with that one is that it came from its story kind of originates in Canada I believe and then just kind of originates in someone's kind of format if you will. So it has this history of it that's still kind of brand new but it has risen up when it comes to some of the apple consumption in The United States. Of course I'm always going to plug the PRI apples, the Purdue Rutgers, Illinois group, wine Chris, the Crimson Chris, Pixie Crunch, Gold Rush, Crimson Crisp those are all great backyard apples, Good apple scab resistance.

Grant McCarty: 42:42

Growers are growing them so you can taste them before you plant them next spring. Those are kind of the core that I tend to say try these out and then put them in the backyard. And then I think from there then it gets back to your traditional ones of Gala and Honeycrisp. But as we know Honeycrisp is rough, it's hard to grow, it's just a difficult apple. You got other great apples to grow in the backyard than that one.

Grant McCarty: 43:12

So yeah, I just rattled off a lot of apples for everyone to try. Minnesota has some good ones that have been showing up and at all these and grocery stores like Sweet Tango and Kudos. You also will sometimes see them even brought into our Illinois Orchard as well.

Emily Swihart: 43:33

The ones that are commercial only, do those ever do make it to the back? Is that just because of licensing that they are commercial?

Grant McCarty: 43:42

That's a good question. Yeah, for some of them they won't. I mean I doubt we're going to see Cosmic Crisp show up in the backyard. For the Midwest Apple Group some of those are exclusive to growers, but it could be depending on how you classify your orchard or the fee you pay. There's not like a big threshold.

Grant McCarty: 44:02

It's not like okay you can only join because of you have 30,000 acres of apples compared to other states where that may be that case. So it's hard to say. I think that most of the ones right now are real exclusive and so much of this comes from quality control more than anything. That they wanted to really control the quality of fruit so that you weren't getting inconsistent fruits at the grocery stores that then could impact whether you bought the fruit the next time.

Emily Swihart: 44:36

Got it. Branding and market control. Yeah. Mean, it does make sense. Honestly, when you said that, I was like, oh, yeah, I guess that would be, you know, a motivation for sure.

Emily Swihart: 44:48

You put a lot of effort into, creating these cultivars. We've dropped a whole bunch of names, right, about the different apples. And so I can get on board with that. When you started out, I was a little bit bummed. I'm like, well, that's a stinky attitude to not share, but I kinda get it now.

Emily Swihart: 45:09

So... Alright.

Grant McCarty: 45:10

Well, and I think that there are just so many apples too, and they all start to kinda taste a little bit similar, that you will find great ones for the backyard. You don't have to worry that you can't get the Crimson Crisp or the the other ones. Oh no the Cosmic Crisp not the Crimson Crisp. Everything has Crisp in it I apologize Yeah. Everything is just...

Grant McCarty: 45:31

Let's put Crisp on every single apple out there.

Ken Johnson: 45:36

About Red Delicious.

Grant McCarty: 45:38

Listen. You know, my mom is not

Emily Swihart: 45:43

You know where it originated Grant? Tread lightly.

Grant McCarty: 45:45

Oh yeah, I will tell you my mom will not listen to this podcast, but all she ever has is Red Delicious. And I tell her all the time, you know what I do, you know the apples that I'm eating, the apples I talk about. And then there's still a bag of Red Delicious always in that kitchen. I'm like, someday.

Ken Johnson: 46:08

So My mom's the same way in this whole shoebox.

Emily Swihart: 46:13

My boys like Red Delicious. But so... Alright. Let me... If you will.

Emily Swihart: 46:19

It is an Iowa apple. And as an Iowan at heart and residency, maybe people don't know that. I get the pleasure of coming over to Illinois and work. Y'all let me in and I adore everybody for it. But I actually do live in Iowa because it's just right over there where I'm at.

Emily Swihart: 46:38

It's just right there. But a homegrown Red Delicious does not taste like a Red Delicious that you get at So the before we all get real judgy.

Grant McCarty: 46:50

That's exactly true, Emily. I mean, are still most orchards in Illinois are most commonly having Red Delicious there. And it's that quality with it. And even yellow discs will be there too sometimes.

Emily Swihart: 47:05

Well, and I'll say that about like a lot of these different cultivars, right? Like you go to an orchard and you pick up like it's, you know, it's a fresh fruit, like off the tree. It does not taste the same as when you get at the grocery store. So whether delicious or otherwise, I think we couldn't all agree that we should encourage people to go try them from the local orchards. Like it's a different experience.

Emily Swihart: 47:30

I know. Got real defensive there. Sorry, guys. Yeah. But...

Grant McCarty: 47:35

It's a Red Delicious podcast. Okay.

Emily Swihart: 47:37

I also really don't love Red Delicious. I think I just have to get... It's in my Midwestern like, pride. I have to be a little defensive. Yeah.

Emily Swihart: 47:47

Or... Yeah. Let's see. Oh, Ken, you're up. That was my question.

Ken Johnson: 47:52

So now that now that we've talked about all these different apples and and, you if if you wanna try some of these before you potentially plant them, is there is there any way we can find orchards in Illinois? Is there, like, a a list somewhere of all of them?

Grant McCarty: 48:06

I'm not aware of any. So maybe some of your viewers may know of some. I think what we do see is that there is a very high concentration of commercial apple orchards in Northern Illinois. You see a little bit less in Central and then you see a little bit less than that in Southern Illinois. Most of them are also kind of around metro areas so if you were say in the Bloomington Normal area you would expect that and there are commercial orchards around that area less so in maybe some of more rural parts of the state.

Grant McCarty: 48:41

Also some of the orchards might be growing at a scale not the same scale as say Michigan apples but a scale that's a little bit bigger against some of the more regional grocery stores with some of the more common apple varieties too. So yeah, I don't know of an apple orchard road map out there that could help you guide your way through as you collect apples and eat apple cider donuts and determine which is better, like which has the best apple cider donuts.

Emily Swihart: 49:13

That'd be a fantastic, like, map to make to... Like, regionally. Very good. And we haven't... We should have asked about apple cider donuts.

Emily Swihart: 49:24

We should have had some because that really fantastic.

Grant McCarty: 49:29

It's a common thing. I mean, have to try them when you go get your apples because every single orchard has one. And there is some differences. Same with cider, you know, all of them are going have a cider typically and they're taking different mixtures and fruits that they are using for that and they're very secretive about their cider recipes. And usually a single cider recipe may have 16 or 17 different varieties too.

Grant McCarty: 49:56

It's usually not just one. That's in there.

Emily Swihart: 50:00

I love that. That's awesome. I'm glad you said that. We have one more question for you, and it's probably our most serious question of all. Before we get to that, there anything else you want us to know about growing apples or managing our apples now in the fall or kind of moving forward?

Grant McCarty: 50:20

Yeah, you know, I think one thing I would just add in here is that the old rule of thumb used to be spacing your apple trees based on the height that they were going to get at maturity. Know, eight to 10 feet down a row and then maybe 10 to 12 feet between a row. I would say that from a homeowner backyard grower perspective you might want to start experimenting with tighter spacing. This may require more management of the limbs, it may require more training of the limbs, but I think it will also be a bit more of a better experience and better fruit quality with this kind of micro imagining of your dwarf trees. So as you look at these orchards on a commercial scale and you see sometimes they're four and five feet between trunks, recognize you could do that in the backyard.

Grant McCarty: 51:06

You may just need to modify and be more on top of stuff and may need to provide you more irrigation. I'm always trying to get people to grow more fruit trees, which is why I'm like spacing a little bit tighter together.

Emily Swihart: 51:20

I like that. I've seen the high intensive spacings at orchards and that looks like too much probably for a backyard grower where they're 18 inches, two feet. They're

Grant McCarty: 51:30

they're pretty tight to two to three feet. You know, you don't mess. You could play around with that obviously. We don't expect the full like trellis system in the backyard, but certainly that tighter spacing is a place to consider and experimenting with.

Emily Swihart: 51:44

I love that. I love that. Well, I'm gonna let Ken ask our last question, but I'll set it up. So last week, and I don't know if we shared this with you, Grant. So last week, got off on one of our tangents and it was because a new segment was born, which is called soup talk.

Emily Swihart: 52:03

We don't know how long this will last. This might be the the second and final version of soup talk. But we're just gonna... I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to Ken for our soup talk question.

Ken Johnson: 52:17

Is Applesauce soup?

Grant McCarty: 52:20

Is Applesauce soup? Well, there are cold soups, right? There are also soups that are just one ingredient. There's also a, of all the questions you asked me, is why I'm stumped with, right? Like this is, this is a, I mean, I maybe, I mean, don't, I don't like, I guess it just depends.

Grant McCarty: 52:59

I mean, I'm not gonna, I will say I'm not I'm not gonna eat a giant cup of applesauce as I would a soup, but people do.

Emily Swihart: 53:11

Does quantity make it a soup?

Grant McCarty: 53:14

Right. Right. Does it? I don't know. I mean, this is a question you're just going to have to keep asking.

Grant McCarty: 53:18

I don't know if it stops me because I can't give you a definitive answer.

Ken Johnson: 53:21

Is it liquidy enough to be a soup?

Grant McCarty: 53:23

Liquidy enough, right? Yeah, that's what I wonder. Or is it just... It's obviously macerated, but is it macerated enough to Yeah. But

Emily Swihart: 53:33

then, like, stews and chill... That was kind of the the predicament last week. Is chili a soup? We we so... Okay.

Emily Swihart: 53:40

Hence the ongoing series. So that was a fun one. But since... I love how much thought you just put into it. So thank you, Grant.

Grant McCarty: 53:54

Welcome. You're

Emily Swihart: 53:56

a true professional, just very thoughtful with your answers.

Ken Johnson: 54:01

Well, was a lot of great information on apples. I mean, what we should be doing this time of year, planting them, taking care of them as applesauce soup. We still don't know. Maybe we never will, but we will see. Well, Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by Emily Swihart.

Ken Johnson: 54:21

Thank you, Emily. Grant, thank you for coming on with us today and sharing your your wealth of knowledge with us.

Grant McCarty: 54:28

Thank you, guys.

Ken Johnson: 54:30

And Emily, thank you as well.

Emily Swihart: 54:34

My pleasure. Yes, Grant. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and continuing soup talk that you're a good sport about that. And so really appreciate that. But, yeah, so I mean, I want to go to an orchard.

Emily Swihart: 54:46

I gotta go like I haven't done that yet now I really want to go try all these different varieties and get some donuts and have some soup but well we'll get that on the calendar but until then what's on the calendar is next week, Ken. Let's do this again.

Ken Johnson: 55:03

Yes, we shall. And I think next week, are gonna be talking about baseball bats. Now that the World Series and playoffs are in play here for, for Major League Baseball, we're gonna talk about baseball bats. So can look look forward to that everybody. Listeners, thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening or if you're watching us on YouTube watching.

Ken Johnson: 55:23

And as always, keep on growing.

Ken Johnson: 55:34

University of Illinois Extension.

Grant McCarty: 55:39

So we don't need to make people mad. So

Emily Swihart: 55:45

That Applesauce question might have already done it.

Grant McCarty: 55:47

I know. Right? Yeah. Cancel. Yeah.

Grant McCarty: 55:49

Cancel for the Red Delicious discourse and the Applesauce.