No blossoms on my apple trees

[Cecil Ellsworth]

Last year I had almost no blossoms on my 10 apple trees. They are in a high tunnel and they all appear to be healthy. Is there a nutrient deficiency of some sort that I can compensate for this spring?

[Mark Wolbers]

Flower buds are set the previous season, so you already have what will bloom this season. Hopefully, you have a good bloom this year. However, my thoughts are to do a soil test now, and then in August do a leaf tissue test to see if there are any nutrient problems that you should be correcting for. Then you will know for sure if it is a soil issue.

[Cecil Ellsworth]

Thank you

[kdblaylock]

How old are your trees? We have some which didn’t bloom until they were around 5 years old. Blooms have increased each year after that.

[Cecil Ellsworth]

Assuming they were two when I got them as bare root stock they are probably six years old now. I got a few apples two years ago (maybe 2 buckets) But last year almost nothing.

[Don Gonzalez]

What do you remember of last year’s winter? Flower buds are the most delicate tissue on the tree, a quick sustained temperature swing at the wrong time can kill all the blooms without affecting the rest of the tree all that much. Heck the high tunnel could be part of the problem. The sun may keep it warm until it doesn’t, then you can have a 30 degrees temperature swing at the wrong time and that’s all the flower buds wrote. A flower bud that can get hardy to -25F will not survive going from temperatures in the 30’s to 0F in a short period of time, it just doesn’t have enough time to adjust.

[Cecil Ellsworth]

I’ll try to take more notes this spring but my apricots, nectarines and peaches did OK. But I don’t remember if they blossom at the same time as the apples

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