SW Texas is probably not as prone to bienniel cropping as areas much farther north. I like thinning blossoms on varieties that give me a lot of trouble. Commercial growers use chemicals to thin apples at a time I'd rather not touch them (for me they are covered with Imidan). According to literature and my experience, this is from petal fall to first cover about 10-14 days later. Usually the first round of thinning at the earlier time is recommended.

Whether this early thinning is useful depends on your climate and the varieties you grow. A long growing season gives the trees more time to store energy for annual cropping.

Thinning at blossom time is risky cuz you can't tell which apple has set completely, or is shaped right. Sometimes the king bud doesn't make the best apple.

Depends, I've never been hurt by overthinning, early or late- it's underthinning that always bites my butt.

Organic growers in the west often use fish oil at bloom to thin their fruit, lacking other spray options. Sometimes it's a risk no matter what you do or choose not to.

Depends, I've never been hurt by overthinning, early or late- it's underthinning that always bites my butt."

Exactly, spoken like someone who has been there and done that. I could tell you stories about thinning, and they always come out positive for the supposed over thinning. I even prefer a little frost if nothing else. I have nightmares about trees loaded with little tiny apples that are going to have to be hand thinned. Never again.

So far everyone here has a full crop. Prices will be down.

Thank you Geraldo! It is the voices of experience that keep me on this site, that and the less experienced who actually appreciate the importance of that experience. There should be some respect given to those who have payed their dues.

That's right, I'm speaking to all you whipper-snapper weekend dirt warriors who believe your superior logic and access to internet info automatically trumps decades of full time work in the soil. Of course, when I was young I was just like you.

Except you did not have internet access Harvestman!!!!!!!!!!

To be fair I counted this on my espalier that tends to not re-use spurs and not one of my spur-types.
50 clusters, 6 flowers per cluster, 6 branches.
1800 flowers cut down to 300.

I wouldn't even consider counting the flowers on one branch of the spur-types, espalier or not.
I think if you are considering cutting the flowers down to one per cluster you don't have enough clusters to worry about thinning.

I also think that you would be making your billboard smaller so you'd be less attractive to bees.
There's a reason trees put out a lot more flowers than fruit.

"Of course, when I was young I was just like you."

So nothing has changed, you just use a different excuse to back up your opinions now? :)

Would you rather only allow the 3-4 who claim superior knowledge be allowed to reply?
That's called a website not a forum.

How do you decide who's superior knowledge is actually superior? I've never had biennial bearing and never focused much attention on thinning. Wanna wrassle to see who's right? :)

This will be my first year to even have to think about thinning. All my two year and older trees are loaded. I even hate to thin vegetables. I may have some kind of anxiety attack when I contemplate thinning the first real crop of fruit I've gotten.

Chuck

Except you did not have internet access Harvestman!!!!!!!!!!

That's right, back in the day when I wasn't struggling through miles of deep snow to get to hort school I had to spend hours in its library to find pertinent info and actually phone Cornell ag advisers and commercial fruit nurserymen to pick their brains as well as befriend commercial fruit growers.

Mykl, you seem very concerned about getting bud-set. Maybe you should consider growing some pollinator inviting plantings to keep the bees and flies on your property permanently (always have food for them and they stay). Pollination is rarely an issue on orchards I manage so I'm wondering if you're speaking from bad experience or just theory.

Harvestman- u know im only teasing- i for one really appreciate your time and advice.

This whipper-snapper weekend dirt warriors only considers himself to be partially knowledgeable because of all the expert and fellow novice experience which is shared on this forum. I'd be lost without it. Thanks again to all!
-Glenn

"Mykl, you seem very concerned about getting bud-set. Maybe you should consider growing some pollinator inviting plantings to keep the bees and flies on your property permanently (always have food for them and they stay). Pollination is rarely an issue on orchards I manage so I'm wondering if you're speaking from bad experience or just theory."

I'm speaking from a drastic drop in bee populations. I wouldn't do anything to send those that are left elsewhere like cutting off 80% of their food supply. Like you said they need food and in the spring that is the fruit tree flowers.
It's the same reason you told me to plant pollinator inviting plantings. You want to attract them by offering food. Was that conjecture?
20 years ago attracting bees wasn't an issue, my trees were swarming all day long. This year I had some days with no bees. Even when they have bees this year I have no problem going near them (allergic to some bee stings) because there aren't that many.

No bees have such a small range that they would stay in my yard permanently. Remember this is "Gardenweb" not "Farmweb". We don't all have acres to plant on.

But mainly I was speaking to the futility of cutting 1500 flowers off one very small and sparsely flowered espalier to pick the center flower out of each cluster. There's probably more like 5000-10000 on a more traditionally trained dwarf.
And hand thinning fruit is supposed to be bad?

I'm speaking from a drastic drop in bee populations.

Do you bring honeybees to your trees to pollinate, or are people raising commercial hives of them near you? If not, then it probably doesn't affect you that much.

What people are talking about in terms of Colony Collapse Disorder is with honeybees, not our native bees or other pollinators (honeybees are not native to the US). Honeybees aren't even that great of pollinators, individually. It's just that we tend to grow our fruit crops in massive monoculture situations, where even if we didn't pesticide out the local fauna, there wouldn't be enough of them out at the same time when the trees bloom. Hence the need to haul around big colonies of honeybees from one orchard to the next.

For a home garden/orchard situation, normally your best pollinators will be things like bumblebees, mason bees, etc, as well as a wide variety of non-bee insects. I particularly like the bumblebees, as they're very docile and extremely efficient. They mark each flower they visit with a scent so that other bumblebees won't waste time on it, and they do "buzz pollination", grabbing onto the flower and vibrating their wings to shake the pollen loose.

As for Colony Collapse Disorder, A) it's long been highly regional and variable (and probably not due to one single cause), and B) seems to be in decline in the past year or so.

What kind of bees are becoming scarce at your place? Have you identified them? You may want to consider setting up bee houses next spring.

Fruit tree flowers, dandelions, currants, blueberries, unidentified weeds- that's some of what my bees and other various pollinators are into right now. I only have 3 acres and even if I had a fifth of an acre I think I could keep enough food for some bumble bee colonies, syrphid flies (whatever their groups are called), etc. I wonder how much room it takes if you plant to have food available during the entire growing season.

Syrphids like mustards and allysum. I grow some Asian mustards in my garden like Bok Choy and let it go to seed to show one example of how you can make them welcome. There are always several types of plants in bloom on my property.

I've never had a season where I felt pollination was a big issue at any of the orchards I manage. It's always just been light bloom- light crop. Heavy bloom-heavy crop. Except about 8 years ago when we got a hard frost in late May. Oh, and maybe with kiwis pollination has been a problem. For some reason the buzzers often seem to dissappear for a period when they are in bloom.

karenrei,
It's not just the captive populations of honey bees that are affected. Escaped populations of honey bees are almost non-existent now. I don't think my city would appreciate people bringing hives into the neighborhood.

Honey bees seemed to be the most active pollinators to me. Maybe it's because of colony size and many of the other bees that are filling the void are solitary.

Other populations fluctuate too. The first year I noticed a honey bee drop bumble bees filled the void. This year they were down. This year it was an assortment of small bees that didn't seem to want to be out unless the sun was out. And later there was a larger bee that came out in numbers.

harvestman,
There is no way you would keep bees confined to 1/5 acre. That would be 2 backyards here, not even if it was a field of flowers all in bloom. I doubt if you're even keeping them on 3 acres. The reason tree planting distances aren't a big issue is because the pollinators travel far. We've ran into them far from the hives on the farm I hunt.

By the time my trees are blooming I'm hopefully putting in my garden but I don't recall bok choy (which is a cabbage) ever surviving a winter it's not cold tolerant. Mustards are annuals and bloom in summer.
This year bulbs are late so there were tulips and daffodils. Lilacs are coming about the same time the apple petals are falling. And of course strawberries. Other than that there's not much else blooming right now.

Mykl, I have several maybe many bumble bee nests on my property, they bore holes into decaying tree stumps (which I leave for them) and even structural wood of my house and shed. You should see how many queens are buzzing around on the first warm day of spring.

Where do you get your bee info? I am speaking only from personal experience myself. If you are also, well, I can only say you are living in another world.

As far as the importance of honeybees pollinating commercial orchards- in the year after the great apple flower freeze in NY where almost the entire crop was wiped out we had a very cool wet spring. Commercial growers were in a panic because there was not a single day when the weather was warm enough for the honey bees to get going.

The trees had huge flower set after being barren the previous year, but many growers believed this was all for naught because the honeybees weren't in the trees. However they got the largest yields per acre in the history of the Hudson Valley.

Why? Because of the work of wild pollinators. Less persistant poisons apparently have created a rebound of populations of these insects in the areas of commercial fruit production, at least in NY state.

I was out on the first nice day in early spring watching what was pollinating my apricots. You wouldn't believe the variety of pollinators that was showing up: big wasps, teeny wasp-looking things, teeny bee-looking things, honeybees, bumblebees, etc. The honeybees were only about 10-20% of the pollinators. I probably see more bumblebees than anything else, they are fond of nesting in the wood siding on our house and there are many of them. They can drill holes right through the wood.

Scott

As far as the importance of honeybees I originally said, "I also think that you would be making your billboard smaller so you'd be less attractive to bees."
That is a known fact and if you don't believe it you are as wrong as you are about bok choy being a mustard or mustard blooming in spring.
I added that on to thinking that it would be making too much work to cut 80% of the flowers off even my sparsely flowered and small espalier, which was my main point.
Honey Bees had nothing to do with it until you tried to puff up your ego and disrespect my experience with, "Pollination is rarely an issue on orchards I manage so I'm wondering if you're speaking from bad experience or just theory.".

My bee population is down this year. I had days with no bees on my trees. Deflate your ego and believe me. Or don't believe me and just go go on with life.

I must be living in a different world. I'm 15' from my backyard while you're trying to tell me how it is in my back yard from 1000 miles away. In my world even if you are able to see clearly for 1000 miles the curvature of the Earth blocks your view.
Is what you are see going on in my yard "just theory"?

You're right, there is some respect that should be given and it should be given by those who have allowed their egos to make them deaf and blind to the experience of anyone but those who trade pats on the back with them.

I'm not some whipper snapper who just started and neither are a lot of others around here. Give respect and you might get it in return.
You reap what you sow.

myk1, good reply. I wanted to say something similar but decided not to post when pissed.

Harvestman, are you sure those are bumblebees boring nests into dead trees and house lumber? I'm not aware of any such abilities among North American bumblebees. Carpenter Bees can be a pest in this respect but I wasn't aware of bumblebees doing that. I'd be interested to know otherwise.

Tcstoehr/Scott-
I was thinking the same thing about the bees. For me, they're wood bees (or carpenter bees) that drill holes in the soffits of my house. But wood bees do look a bit like bumble bees... see the link below.

It's interesting. I go up there and patch the holes with putty, etc, and they just look at me. They're big and scary looking, but they don't sting me. (Though I am a magnet for yellow jacket stings!) They just watch and seem to say "Buzz... Hey, what are you doing to our house?!?!... Buzzz". Before, I knew that they mine were docile, I had tried spraying them with the usual hornet/wasp spray. They just shook it off and continued hovering and watching.
-Glenn

Here is a link that might be useful: Carpenter bees resemble bumble bees...

Oh good, another offended bull. Always adds spice to the web. The point I'm making about experience is that if you dispute a point by someone spending 50 times more of their time doing something and their living depends on it and their at 100 times more sites then you best not be quickly dismissive. You may know about your site but not as well as you might because your aren't really comparing it to any others. Amateurs tend to exaggerate the significance of their anecdotal observations. Actually we all do but the volume of experience matters.

I don't care about your respect becuase you seem a bit like a lost cause, but if I'm going to invest all the time it takes to make a post I'm sure going to let the questioner know where my voracity comes from. It does puzzle me why you waste time and energy being offended by absolute strangers.

I actually didn't mean to disrespect you when I asked about the source of your info, I thought you might be on to something I wasn't aware of. I wasn't even specificly referring to you when I talked about "whippersnappers".

I also don't really care who respects me or who doesn't on line in general- this is just for fun and info, my important relationships are elsewhere.

My professional ego is only gratified when I get the check in the mail for my services or by the appreciative comments of someone who paid for them. As I said, I only go to the trouble of "pulling rank" to give the questioner a means of evaluating contrasting info. I give a pat on the back to anyone who says something that I find surprising or interesting when it's backed up by a convincing rational. It is out of gratitude.

Thank you whippersnappers. Tcs etc you are right, I have been lumping carpenters with bumble bees apparently, but at least in my defence the carpenter is an avid pollinator so Mykl could benifit from allowing them some habitat.

Of course I still stand by everything I say about creating a bee friendly habitat even while admitting I'm no bee expert. Also that it isn't always risky to thin flowers if you have experience with a given cultivar that shows otherwise. On this subject I am fairly expert.

Always thought bok-choy was in the mustard family- anyway my syrphid flies do like those blossums. Seeds sure taste like mustard, hmmmm.

I also advise you against getting pissed off at strangers on the internet. It's a complete waste of energy.

The above dialog is another example that we all live in a very INTOLERATE country............some resort to violence,others to the ballot box, others to the legal system,etc.etc.
Ah! for the good ole days when people were much more civil.
Lets just exchange info and not try to "control".

In the "good old days" there were fist fights in congress and blacks could be hung for supposedly eyeing a white girl.

People argue, it's human, some more than others depending on personality. I'm argumentative and happy with that and don't really mind if those annoyed by this silly combat hold my personality against me. That's their racket and I have mine.

I admit to being a pompous idiot on this thread and that Mykl made a good point about a larger number of flowers possibly increasing the chances of pollitnation by drawing more bees.

I still think he's excessively defensive and ignored several good points about pollinator populations in general without actually describing specific pollination problems he's experienced. Not seeing as many bees does not mean that populations are generally down and I still don't know if he ever experienced crop failure as a result of inadequate pollination- he never mentioned that.

As far as my aggravation, which was actually spoken quite generally and only in context of this thread because of Geraldo being a professional grower and not anything else preceding it, it does get frustrating when people routinely exaggerate the significance of very limited observations. It would be good if we all used phrases like, "in my limited experience" more.

Personally I thought my best point was that it's 1500 flowers to be removed and that's going by a very small tree that doesn't put out a lot of flowers. I wasn't about to count enough to estimate how many flowers were on the very small tree that puts out a lot of flowers, counting alone was too much work.

How would you know for sure if pollination was the problem? Wouldn't you need one of those apples that set fruit whether or not it gets pollinated and go by how many seeds you had? I've had years that looked good until June drop. Were they unpollinated, not fully pollinated, bugged or simply more than the tree thought it could handle?
All I know for sure is I'm seeing a lot fewer pollinators this spring than in previous years. Yesterday was a sunny day and there was nothing on my apples and I still have some new flowers opening. Maybe they watched the wrong weather report and saw it was supposed to rain or maybe the lilacs offered an easier meal.

I don't expect any fruit set problems even with the lack of pollinators this year. 1000 flowers visited would amount to an extremely small percentage of the flowers I had and 10 bushels would be an extremely good year. I'd settle for a lot less.
I'm a little put off because it seemed they focused on one tree per day but I never stayed out and monitored the trees for the whole day. It was just nicer when the trees were swarming and it was clear the bees were going from tree to tree.

The extent of my personal pollination paranoia, which has been taken care of with 4 new trees spanning the bloom times, was relying on a neighbor's tree when picking mine and then having another neighbor die and a worthless lump move in. One tree is gone and I suspect the other will be as soon as his wife gets sick of smelling rotten apples all fall.

The start of my defensiveness is that elitism rubs me the wrong way and it really has no place on a forum like this where growing conditions and personal tastes/desires keep anyone from being too much of an expert. All we have are opinions based on our experience and preference. What works for rural monoculture doesn't always work for suburban yards.
Then it started to seem like I was getting ridden about the pollinators based on your experience rather than mine.
I'm happy to be argumentative too.

The only "this experienced advice is absolute" that has applied to me was from my old neighbors that shared the same fence. That same advice doesn't even apply a few miles way.

Mykl, of course all posts are equally legitimate and going over the sequence of my posts, I actually fail to see what brought on your initial aggravation- once we both became defensive I'm not proud of my tone or words. Initially I just asked you where you were drawing your conclusions from- not suggesting you are an idiot.

Pulling off flowers is a lot less time consuming than pulling off fruit sometimes and I have cultivars that I routinely remove half the spurs from or at least the flowers on the spurs before I even think about thinning fruit. On Asian pears this is often necessary just to keep them adequately vegetative as well as some really spurry apples.

As far a whether your trees suffered from a lack of pollinators, I certainly would expect that to be the case if you had a heavy bloom, good weather, healthy trees that thrived and stored energy the previous season,etc. and still experienced a light crop.

I manage orchards on small and large parcels and in suburban to rural situations but almost all of my customers have a lot of space compared to what you describe and if you are surrounded by a bunch of tidy lawns where people whack their dandelions etc. and very little is left to be wild you are in an environment to which I'm unaccustomed- therefore "another world".

Peace, Alan Haigh

For what it's worth, I'll state the obvious in that this is basically an amateur forum mostly populated by backyard growers in which fortunately a number of experts (some more crotchety than others) take the time to share their extensive knowledge (for which a number of us whippersnappers are very grateful). As such, I think most people welcome "backyard observations" because the net sum of these observations is valuable (especially the mistakes). I also think that most people appreciate when others, even non-experts, post links to relevant studies. These links may be already well known to resident experts, but a number of us have learned a lot from these links. I also canÂt help but ask whether, as a non-expert, it would be technically acceptable for me to post a link to a harvestman post to support my non-expert observations or would doing so disqualify me as a goospert?

I also don't think it is necessary to preface every statement with "in my limited experience." Some folks do it as a courtesy, but if anyone wants to check the experience level of a poster, they can simply click on their "my page" link and decide for themselves whose advice they will follow. Even apart from checking this link, it isnÂt hard to tell the expert posts from non-expert links by simply reading the content of the post.

Of course, I might be wrong about the above, but I think I read this forum obsessively enough to get a pretty good sense of the posting population of this forum (and that doesn't even account for the number of non-expert lurkers/readers, who I'm sure are far greater in number than those that actually post).

I shouldn't have simply suggested "in my limited experience" which is a phrase I actually use a lot here and elsewhere. "In my opinion" is good.

Goospert is my word and used here because sometimes people suggest that because a university published some home orchard suggestions that it automatically trumps a valid point. I know that there are numerous participants on this web that have signigicantly more home orcharding knowledge and experience than many of the writers of these kinds of publications. Home orcharding is simply not researched by universities. I never used that word to disdain helpful links, for which I'm often greatful (helped me identify my carpenter bees!).

I learn as much here from the amateurs as the pros, on this topic I learned that some of my bumble bees were actually carpenter bees.

All that said, I still get irritated when someone draws a very large conclusion from a small experience and contradicts something I just posted that is info based and not opinion. I'm sure my mechanic feels the same way when customers with limited experience make troubleshooting suggestions in contradiction to his proposed solution. Of course he's entitled to that reaction- it's his shop. This is not my blog so I should control myself, which is why I have apologized. I also apologize for the extreme egotism of this post- as if this is all about me!

I've lost track, what are you all arguing about? I need to know so that I can determine whose side I am on.
In my experience, in my area, on my farm, IMHO; if I don't have some bee hives of Italian honey bees, or Caucasian or whatever, I don't get fruit. We don't have enough of the Wild Thangs to do the job. So take that. I steal my neighbor's bees using something called Bee-Scent. It is not restricted and it is cheap. Oh, IMHO. I spray this and his bees come over to my place.
I never thought I would be crotchety in my old age, but you young whippersnappers just won't listen.

If my bee issues keep up (had another sunny day with a few new flowers still opening and nothing but my carpenter bee who didn't stop, a bumble bee or bumble bee moth, a few gnat type things and a sweat bee) I'm going to have to look for that Bee-Scent.

While I was out looking at my trees I figured out that if you had the gumption to actually prune all the flowers down to the center flower you should have the same gumption to hand pollinate.
But it would still be too much work for me on my spur-types (which are 5 out of 7, or 2 out of 3 presently bearing age).

So Geraldo, is some of your land wild with lots of various flowering plants in bloom during the entire growing season? I'm guessing some of it is. Also, how many acres of fruit trees are you needing to pollinate?

I wonder if there aren't just more pollinating insects in the humid regions. Any entomologists out there?

By the way, Geraldo, did you read the post by the Australian peach grower who developed a single leader system for peaches where he removed all biannual wood annually? Planted standard root stocks only 3' from each other as I recall and kept the harvest within ladderless reach. Pulled it off by reduced fertilization and watering- not with summer pruning.

You don't want to blossom thin by hand, that is a lot of work. I do like harvest's spur pruning idea. I use to take the pruners and just drag them down the top of the limb on spur type reds. I couldn't get my guys to do that though, they would just look at each other like I had lost my mind. It was so foreign to them.
My forty acres, M/L, is in the midst of cultivated fields of all kinds of crops: cherries, apples, hops, grapes, corn, alfalfa, wheat, pears, pasture, dairy, peach, etc. etc. Most of my neighbors have a grass cover crop that looks like your lawn. I have knee high vetch, clover, alfalfa, anything that grows. It looks like a weed crop to my neighbor, or at least that is what he says. So I always have things blooming. I see bumblebees and leaf cutter bees, but if someone in the area doesn't rent bees then we get fewer apples. I have a rich neighbor who spares no expense so I "steal" his bees. I have so many varieties that cross pollination is not a problem.
I didn't see that Aussie method, but I would like to try that so that I can machine thin peaches (see, back to thinning so we are not thread crapping). The machine thinner is a machine that goes down the row and hits the tree with cords that have been fastened onto a rotating vertical shaft. It has to get into the center of the tree so one vertical leader with no scaffolds would be best.
I will likely phase out of fruit over the next five years. There seems to be no money in apples for the small grower. Cherries are severely over-planted. Peaches come off in a short time frame and in that time frame there is intense competition. Going to farmer's markets is lot of work and the competition has gotten to be intense. There is a lot of lifting of boxes and for an older man it is more difficult as the years go by.
Hiring labor and other inputs have gotten to be exponentially more expensive, but if you look at it our prices received have not bettered, in real terms, what I received in the late 1980's.

Geraldo, my sister lives near Eureka CA which is neither rich nor poor or I should say it is rich and poor. At the green markets their they charge $6 a pound for sweet cherries at seasons peak and $4 a pound for stone fruit. More importantly, people buy it. You're just to dam rural.

I bet you've claimed your about to get out of fruit growing for the last 20 years.

Of course hand thinning flowers wouldn't be efficient for you- you chemically thin, don't you, and then come back when you've left too much on?

I only hand thin flowers on Goldrush and a couple fierce bienniels generally because, as I said, I don't like getting Imidan on my hands when it is still potent. I just do it on my own trees occassionally and clients rarely. Still I think a home orchardist with a few trees might want to do it because the sooner they are off the more energy goes where you want it. Don't know how much difference it would make though.

I probably should at least thin the trees that are only 2-3 years in the ground. Do you guys snip off the apples or just pull them off? Trivial question? I'm at work so I can't go out and see how hard I gotta tug to pull one off. Perhaps it is important that the twig come off entirely?

Chuck

I pinch and leave spurs unless I am trying to encourage greater vegetative growth- then I might remove whole spurs. Even if spurs don't produce fruit they are going to spend energy on flowers for the following year. If a tree is runted this will often step on the gas.

In your case it depends on rootstock and relative vigor. Dwarfs should begin fruiting 2nd or 3rd year if adequately vigorous based on my limited experiences with fully dwarfing rootstocks. I have read that M9 matched with a precocious variety can runt out easily if not managed for max vigor.

I don't go any smaller than 26 in my nursery so i'm no expert here.

A libidinous grower with glee
Set out to "deflower" his tree
For hours and hours
He picked bushels of flowers
"Now that was exciting!" said he

Excellent topic. I read about thinning here last Spring, and i really really thought i had sufficiently thinned. Of course, my heart wasn't really in it because the tiny fruit looked so adorable and perfect and full of promise. I cringed every time i snipped one off and tossed it into the woods. This year, the comparative lack of flower on the apples is telling me i didn't thin enough.

Will my trees sproing back next year with more fruit? Is this a lesson i was doomed to learn the hard way?

At the green markets their they charge $6 a pound for sweet cherries at seasons peak and $4 a pound for stone fruit." Yes, but in our area, Seattle, there are lot of growers and the share each gets has been getting smaller each year. It has reached the point where it just isn't worth it.
If you aren't organic then I would use Sevin, or NAA or any chemical thinner. Hand thinning is just too time consuming.

"a few trees might want to do it because the sooner they are off the more energy goes where you want it. Don't know how much difference it would make though." See that is just it, I don't think it would make too much difference on the size of current crop, because you don't want the really big apples anyway. I do think it makes a difference on alternate bearing. The earlier you can thin the more assured you are of a blooming tree next spring. But it takes guts to go out there and knock off flowers when spring frost season hasn't ended.

Estreya,
I hope I'm wording this right. The first two times didn't make sense.

If the cause of low flowering was too much fruit the previous year the next year should have more.
If the cause of low flowering was an external source (freeze, bugs, thinning, etc) it should have more fruit.

But if the cause of low flowering is physical (pruning at a time that causes branch growth, disease, nutrition, etc) it may not have more fruit unless the problem is corrected.

I was pruning my McIntosh at the wrong times and either causing my spurs to turn into branches or that's how my tree does and I was pruning at the wrong time and causing next year's spurs to turn into branches. With the help of the forum and some trial and error I figured out (or more accurately, am in the process of figuring it out) that late August causes spur growth for that tree, anything between September and August causes branch growth.
I knew too much fruit wasn't an issue because it turned into a tree that never had many flowers or much fruit.

Yes, you've made sense, Myk1. :) I'm quite certain the cause of the low flowering is too much fruit left on the tree last year. I knew it at the time - my gut told me i wasn't thinning enough. The tree is otherwise gorgeous and robust. Just not too many flower clusters.

Pruning is a whole other topic that gives me the shivers. I pruned only very very lightly when the tree was still dormant - again, i'm fairly sure i didn't prune enough. Thankfully, that's an issue i won't have to revisit till next February or so ... and hopefully, i'll learn a little more by then.

We fruit noobies are such a bother, aren't we? I hope we at least amuse at times ... :)

I love noobies, it's those adolescents that make my teethe hurt.

Mykl, what rootstock are you growing Mac on? For me this variety fruits on 2-year wood primarily and I don't have to do any special pruning to develop spur-wood. Is yours an espallier? The pruning technique you're describing is what I might do if that was the case. Nothing fruits more easily and regularly here then Macintosh.

Yes mine is an espalier, and it's from Stark so I don't know what rootstock it is.
I had a pretty good guess at one time but forgot.
It's also an interstem so I'm not sure if the rootstock matters as much as the stem.
It was from around '88 and dwarf.

It seemed to start out keeping spurs on the scaffolds. Then I think always pruning it back and the scaffolds getting old caused those spurs to go to branches.
My guess is that after that it never produced enough fruit to use up the energy of being pruned smaller than it wanted it was always trying to grow more branches, coupled with bad timing causing it to never produce enough fruit to use up the energy and I got in a vicious circle.

That would probably be 111 with a 9 interstem. Ends up having vigor around an M7, I think, maybe a bit less, and with Mac that would make it somewhat vigorous for an espallier. I've got some on that rootstock combination from Cummins, not Macintosh but Baldwin and some others. You're not getting any small wood off the scaffolds that you could just let go without it becomming intrusive? I would just try to get it fruiting again on some very slender unpruned 2 year pencils. Or I'd remove the entire scaffolds and start over with slim replacements. How much space are you confining it to?

Forgot to mention scoring. You've probably heard of using a sharp saw to make a narrow cut to just below the cambium circularly around the base of the trunk. Or you can use 2 half cirlces a couple inches apart. Done about at bloom (of other apples) it encourages carbo storage upstairs which is used to develop flower buds.

It is kind of vigorous for an espalier. The reason one of my semi-dwarfs is McIntosh is because I figure I'll end up replacing it or cutting it off just below the upper graft union and putting something else on top. The spur-type next to it is very well behaved as an espalier.
I'd guess it to be 2 trees 15' long and 5.5' tall, 3 tiers.

I tried replacing scaffolds at one time, but I don't remember if that was for fruiting or to repair some "help" from the dogs. It didn't work out too well, I think what I need to do for that is to take them all off at once, and possibly take the top tier off at the second tier.
The bottom 2 tiers are cooperating with pruning/training small branches back through the center. The top one is the real problem and I think trying to keep it in check is telling the rest to go nuts.

But with last year's timing I have some small branches that have multiple fruit sets rather than just at the tip. Hopefully with timing I'll be able to thin the top and get that to happen up there too.
Then by the time I'm ready to give up my new McIntosh should be producing and I'll have an idea whether Stark's new non-interstem spur-types would be a good replacement or whether I should graft a spur-type on top of the interstem.

If it's against a south wall I'd graft on Goldrush. You could probably ripen it well there and it certainly will behave. Goldrush would perform in that space on straight 111 I think. Braebern as well. You could be eating apples all winter instead of dreaming of Macs that are only good for a month.

I've still got Arkansas Black in the fridge from last year (more as a storage test). I'd already be eating apples all winter if I didn't squish most of the ARB for cider. That tree produces a lot of edible apples even without spraying so storage isn't where I'm lacking.
I'm sure that one would be well behaved there, it's probably been 15 years on semi-dwarf roots and this is the first time I've ever pruned it for size and it was only 17'-18'.

If I don't move something I already have I'd have to wait and see the flavors and production of the new trees to see what holes need filled.

You are certainly no fruit whippersnapper. Not sure how we got off on the wrong foot, but I'm insane during the spring months.

If you want a summer apple I bet Ginger Gold would work on that rootstock, maybe Jonathon as well, also Honeycrisp (both late summer, of course). I have to admit that I don't manage many espalliers.

So does it appear Ab Pip is curculio resistant? That would be great.

Ab Pip as in Newtown? I don't know, my niece's were pretty much bug free with no spray but it's (or was ... I'm working on her and her acres :) ) the only apple within sight and her pear is extremely hard and late.
I'd love to put a scion from her tree there but I think it would be the same problem different apple.

If you meant AR Black it seems fairly bug resistant.
By the time that tree was bearing the bugs were winning the organic battle and I was giving up and not even trapping. I'd still get a handful that weren't perfect for storage but were edible. I had some perfect apples from it during my neglect period but nothing to get excited about.
Most of the damaged late term apples from it were apple maggot, they're constant all through the summer.
I didn't start spraying (which is where I am a newbie) until late June/early July last year and there were some curculio drops but nothing like from the Cortland/McIntosh.

But they are rock hard, or if I was writing a catalog, "crisp" (I wonder if the kids that stole a branchful in September will be stealing any this year).

I hope my flowers are off and it's not going to rain so I can get out and spray today. A good fruit set of McIntosh without a wave of curculio drops will be heaven.