Plant where they receive maximum sun.

If you have deer then you need to fence your apple trees until they are mature. I use 5 foot high fencing from the big box store and one 6' post that I put on the north side of the tree. While the tree is young you can use that post to support the tree. You'll need 12 foot of fence for each tree; most of the 50 foot roll, for the 3 trees. If you take down the fence too young the bucks will use your trees to rub their horns each year. That fence won't stop rabbits. I find if you keep a source of drinking water the squirrels and birds won't eat your apples ........... as much.

I would suggest you purchase bare root seedlings online from a company such as Stark, Fedco, Cummings Nursery or Grandpa's Orchard. But if you live in the north west you might want to order closer to home.

If you want more than 3 varieties you can plant more than one tree in a hole. If you do that you treat each variety as a part of a single tree. In other words don't let a tree grow thru the center. I planted 4 hard cider apples in the same hole this past spring as I don't think I need that many of each variety to make a batch of cider. I would need mostly a sweet dessert apple for most of the apples in any batch of cider.

You pick the size of a tree by how much space you want to allow for each tree, and how many apples you want per tree. Remember most of the apples will come ripe at the same time on any tree. Some varieties will store till spring and some store for a good week. A long storing apple will effectively extend the usable life of apples as though they came ripe slowly over time

Rome and Northern Spy are excellent pie apples. Rome's start ripening very quickly and Northern Spy's very slowly, My wife's favorite pie apple is Golden Delicious; which is on your list.

I planted 3 apple trees here about 18 years ago. My main 2 problems in getting any good apples by season's end was Cedar Rust disease and Squirrels. If your area lacks Cedar trees that can eliminate a main problem, squirrels are another matter as they will steal them before they're even ripe and will clean out a young tree in no time. Deer will eat all the leaves off of your young fruit trees as JohnD says above, so until they grow high enough out of their reach you'll need to fence them in too.

have you looked into the preventative spraying you will need to do.. to end up with a crop??

it usually starts with a dormant spray n late winter ... and then 3 or 4 additional spraying during the growing season ... if you want anything close to the pretty apples you see in the store ...

this is why i eventually gave up on my home orchard dream ... giant pia.. and i didnt want to be spraying with the kids around ... im sure i could have done it safely.. but why bother...

ken

One more thing Don’t have junipers nearby.

I don’t really have much time for maintenance besides putting up some chicken wire around them. i also have a bunch of kids so I thought it would be fun for them to have growing apple trees but I dont want to spray any pesticides...

Good luck. My experiences mirrored @vgkg Z-7 Va & @ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5. I eventually gave up. I gained a greater respect for those who successfully grow apples.

Maybe it's the location - we produce a lot of apples here in WA state - but I've never had to spray any apple trees I've grown. And there are numerous fully organic orchards around. So it is certainly possible to grow apples without heavy pesticide use.

A lot depends on what issues your area may present and your tolerance level for a less than perfect looking fruit. And there are disease resistant cultivars available that can make life a lot easier if you are willing to reconsider your selections (neither Granny nor the G, Delicious are the slightest bit disease resistant).

I wouldn’t be discouraged, Mali. Apple trees are not hugely expensive and if you research cultivars suitable for your area and which will pollinate each other I see no reason not to do the experiment.

Ask your local ag extension if there's cedar rust disease in your area (the host is a type of juniper, not a true cedar). Ask about other diseases in your area.

You may end up growing them on a strict spraying program. Ask yourself if this is something you're prepared to do.

https://extension.umn.edu/plant-diseases/cedar-apple-rust

As previously noted there ARE apple cultivars that are resistant to cedar-apple rust.....and scab and fireblight (the three most common apple diseases) so if you choose carefully, spraying may not be required at all.

You're forgetting insect damage. Unless you like worms in your apples, some spraying (or careful bagging) is required. Washington and Oregon have the best growing conditions for apples, but sadly that's not the experience for the vast majority of us.

Both apple maggots and codling moth can be successfully treated without spraying. Even plum curculio can be controlled with minimally invasive methods.

Gardengal, can we see a pic of your your apple trees?

It looks like the area where you want to plant is surrounded by good sized trees - which means shade for a lot of the day. So pay attention to how much sun the area is actually getting - fruit trees need a lot.

I struggled with deer not only eating the young branches and leaves, but also eating all of the apples just as they were ripening. They also attacked my flowers, vegetables, and other fruits, so I ended up erecting 8' fencing all around my back yard; at first I surrounded the apples with a double wall of wire fencing (deer don't like to jump that, one 'wall' 2 ft inside the other.) Now I am struggling with squirrels and raccoons, so I have had to put netting all over the trees as well.

I've not struggled too much with insect damage or diseases, but I do keep an eye out and will spray with environmentally friendly products when needed.

If you want to minimize the work, be sure to get dwarf, disease resistant trees. You will need to prune them as they get established and grow, to produce a healthy structure and help them produce a nice crop. Check with your county extension service for recommendations of good varieties for your area.

Sorry, no.........but I currently rent so that's why no fruit trees to show. However I did grow Gravenstein at a previous garden for over 25 years with no sprays of any kind. And Grav's are about the least disease resistant apple variety I can think of. It did get scab every year but never to the point where it harmed the tree and the fruit was pretty much unaffected. And in some years it got powdery mildew but that is primarily a cosmetic issue and really has minimal impact on an established tree.

JoJo, your comment seems to imply that I am some how making this up. ANY garden growing ANY type of plant can be approached organically. It is just a matter if one takes the time and effort to understand the methodology that can result in a chemical pesticide-free environment or not. For the home hobby gardener, it is far easier than it is for a commercial orchardist! And there are tons of publications online, most from the extension services, that outline the methodology in detail

I do the 6' fence as @John D Zn6a PIT Pa described and works good. Rabbits can be a problem on younger trees in the winter and may eat the bark at the base of the tree. If they eat all the way around it kills the tree and it's called girdling. I lost a couple in my early days to rabbits until I learned it was rabbits and how to protect the trunk base. You may also what to protect the trunk for a few years to prevent frost cracking if you like. The freezing and thawing in late winter/early spring may crack the bark usually on the south side of the tree but it won't kill the tree and looks bad.

One last tip and I'll shut up. Start pruning the tree the day you plant it. You don't want branches growing 3 ft from the ground and the branches don't get higher as the tree grows, they stay at the same height. Read up and prune and train the tree from the start, and every year (late winter) for a beautiful well branched productive tree. Good luck.

I have a few disease-resistant apple trees here in the disease and humidity-filled northeast, and have no issues getting lots of good fruit with zero spraying, so long as bag my fruit when they're small, and accept a little bit of fruit loss to plum curculio.

One of my trees (Crimson Crisp) does get a lot of cedar apple rust, but it's a purely cosmetic affliction around here, and doesn't affect the fruit or the health of the tree in the slightest.

Wild apple trees also grow prolifically around here on roadsides, abandoned lots and state forest land, and many of them produce an abundance of very edible fruit without anyone having ever given them an ounce of attention.

Thank you, sah67, for confirming that it is possible to grow apples (and other fruits and plants) without the heavy use of chemical pesticides! I am not sure why some seem to feel that the PNW is exempt from any disease and pest issues. We are not and fungal based diseases are just as common here as they can be elsewhere and are in fact so prevalent that the disease resistance of what one selects to plant is a major determining factor with plant selection.

Here's a link to a WSU spraying schedule. I clicked on the apple link there and found this statement "Reapply after brief heavy rainfall or showers of longer duration, then resume regular schedule." I would Guess that here if I follow that recommendation that I may have to spray 50 times per season, and in the PNW it rains more often than here.

So I don't take seriously the suggestion that in the PNW you can grow apples without applying pesticides.

John, what you don't know could fill a book!! And is quite easily exemplified by "and in the PNW it rains more often than here."

And your last statement makes no sense at all.

gardengal - 2 days ago you said "Maybe it's the location - we produce a lot of apples here in WA state - but I've never had to spray any apple trees I've grown. And there are numerous fully organic orchards around. So it is certainly possible to grow apples without heavy pesticide use."

So I agree that makes no sense!!!!

I do find the discussion of wild apples not needing as much spraying to have some merit.. There are wild apple trees here that seem to have grown from seeds that produce apples that don't look as bad as the apples that I sprayed a few times this year. Both my Golden Delicious and the Honeycrisp are garbage even tho I sprayed. The Yellow transparent had some near perfect apples and I didn't spray it. After many years I got an apple from another tree that was edible looking. We both loved the apple, the first time we ever liked the same apple. With some research I'm guessing it's a Cox's Orange Pippin, some say the best tasting apple ever.

I didn't know the PNW is a desert.

JohnD, the eastern halves of Oregon and Washington are quite arid. The Yakima Valley is considered semi-desert yet it is a major apple and wine grape producer.

Here where I am, it is humid, with either lots of rain or with extended dry spells (in the midst of one now) and plenty of opportunistic diseases and bugs - yet as I said above, I rarely spray and when I do, I use an environmentally friendly product. I sprayed once this year to get rid of peach leaf curl - that was it.

I'm in z6a, NE Pennsylvania, so I'm guessing I'm in a similar area to you. I have a 'Freedom' apple planted in 2013 which gets next to no care from me... and it shows. It's supposed to be a highly disease-resistant variety but in the location I have it that hasn't been the case. I think your location is similar, with 'full sun' but lots of neighboring trees and a kind of woodland surrounding and not an open field with lots of air flow -which is what I think mine would like.

Regardless, I do get apples which are edible (although the flavor on this variety isn't what I was hoping for) but you won't be displaying a bowl of my apples on the kitchen table :)

They don't look good and neither does the disease ridden foliage on the tree, but it's been fun and I'd do it again.

Just fyi, I also planted a Bartlett pear. It's loaded with fruit which we've been eating for about a month and they are delicious. Maybe the apple should have been planted where the pear tree is but the pear has been much easier.

raee - The statement I quoted referred to what she grew and "fully organic orchards around" would, I take it, refer to the Seattle area. However the Washington State university article I linked to didn't differentiate. If one had to guess I would guess they were referring to either. That article did focus on individual growers so you could guess most of their audience would be Seattle; but I think they have enough intelligence to specify which audience if they thought it mattered.

The 3 sprays I made this year were fairly effective even though I would have preferred to do 4. However this year the apples were invaded with swarms of fruit flies which affected the entire apple surface. What I read recommended constant spraying which I'm unwilling to do.

If you want to grow apples for making pies, apple butter or apple sauce I think it might be wise to just use a wild apple or maybe grow a few trees from seed. From what I see here the insects and critters much prefer the most preferred dessert apples. perhaps grow one favored apple as a sink for your from seed apple trees. I did a cider apple walk last fall at a local orchard and we were allowed to pick an apple off a tree and sample it. These were apples that most would call "spiiters". I was surprised by how much better they tasted that what I would have guessed. I did, however, taste a Johnamac off a tree and did prefer it.

For those who would like a little bit of clarity, Seattle occupies a very small portion of the PNW so why someone would focus on Seattle as being the bellwether of what can grow here just indicates a lack of knowledge about the area. Yes, the area is divided by the Cascade mountains into the hot, arid, eastern half of the region and the coastal western portion being cool, often foggy and damp with all the same opportunities for diseases as the higher humidity areas of the east coast. But this is also very much a Mediterranean climate, with damp, mild winters and cool but very dry summers. Except for the Olympic rainforest, most of the PNW receives much less rainfall than anywhere along the east coast and that is concentrated in the winter months.

The discussion is response to your claim that apples can be grown without spraying like you did with your one tree years ago. It rains in Seattle 160 days a year and 150 days here.