My Pink Lady took 18F about four wks ago. The fruit was basically undamaged. We have had several lesser freezes since and the trees still have most of their leaves. They will loss their leaves by spring as we have many frosts to go. Not so sure about the low chill thing as they are very late to leaf and bloom in the spring. They were still blooming this yr in July and August but most of the bloom was in May and June. I think you will find that with high chilling they will bloom early and concentrated. Axel, you have more chilling and higher quality chilling than we do. But compared to Oregon or Washington you are still not high in amount or quality of chilling. At least not for some apples, in my opinion.

Do agree about Fuji not liking low chilling conditions. Yes it does leaf and bloom but over about two months not wks. Ginger Gold is the same way but Gala has a much earlier and concentrated bloom.

All I can say is that apples have a very complicated reaction to differing chilling and growing season regimes. Here in Alpine TX we are supposed to be about 700 hrs chilling. But mostly we are too warm by day, 60s, and too cool by night, often 20s. Apples bloom later and over a much longer period here than in Amarillo TX which is about 1200 to 1400 hrs chilling. In both places you are likely to see a 50 to 60F range in temperature each week from Nov to April. So seeing one night in the 20s and and several days in the 70s each week is the norm not unusual. That is not ideal chilling and very frost prone.

But I do love those Pink Lady apples any way I can get them. I like them much better than Fuji.

The Fruitnut

I hope someone will chime in from a real winter area, say Oregon or Washington. There the winter is really cold or in coastal areas they probably have 2500 hrs or more in the 30s and 40s. In these real winter areas I think you will find most apples have a concentrated bloom of 10-14 days and little or no late bloom. In coastal California where Axel is or other mild winter areas like Alpine Texas, apple bloom will be all over the place and highly variety dependent.

Stone fruit on the other hand is less adaptable to varying chilling. It either gets enough chilling or doesn't. I've never seen or heard of it blooming all summer.

And to your other question Axel, apple fruit and foliage are very hardy.

The Fruitnut

The issue isn't chill, it's irregular watering. I get very concentrated blooms on all my trees, but my watering system failed, so the trees that got drought stressed in August and then watered well in Sept plus the 10 inches from the typhoon remnants in Sept. pretty much got a handful varieties to bloom again.

I think I will just remove the fruitlets on pink lady. One of my dorsett golden is completely bare, the other one is in a real sunny location that seems to warrant continued growth through the Winter months.

My hope was to get off cycle crops, but I think we get too much chill, we're in the 30's at night and the mid 40's during the day right now, there's no way there will be much activity. I am still hoping there is a variety that doesn't have dormancy requirements and can still ripen a crop through the Winter months.

Nonethesuch is an interesting variety, it has zero chill requirements and is grown in Alaska where they can only grow low chill varieties. I know it's sounds counter intuitive, but remember that when a tree is totally frozen, it isn't accumulating any chill hours, they don't have a long Spring, they go from Winter to a coolish Summer, so they need varieties that can jump out of dormancy the moment things thaw. The only varieties that work are the ones that have low chill requirements.

Lady Williams will fruit through the winter for us here in Inland Southern California, peaking out around the first week of February, two weeks after Anna blooms. Both Anna and Dorsett Golden will continue blooming through frost down to about 28 degrees without much damage.

Fuji fruits well for us with our 200 chilling hours; it is interesting that I have two identical Fuji trees right next to each other, and one is loaded this year and the other only a few apples, and so there may be factors other than chill in play if you're not getting fruit.