While I'm at it, here's a list of apples from Laguna Hills Nursery that can be very good around the San Diego area, and also if you click on the link, it is a listing of most low chill types of fruits from Laguna Hills Nursery in Southern California:


http://www.lagunahillsnursery.com/menuwebs/Decidtrees05.asp

Apple trees prefer ample water and love lawn conditions. Apples have some pests. Fireblight (worst on Gala) can be controlled by application of copper sulfate just before bloom. Codling moth (apple worms) can be lessened by proper thinning and choosing early or late ripening varieties.

Except for Anna, I have most of these apples growing in the very hot inland Valley, multi-grafted of course.

Anna
Blooms February. Large cylindrical, mostly red fruit with creamy, white tender, crisp, sweet flesh. Harvest July-August. Best eaten fresh. Fruit quality is better away from coast. Often has a second crop in November. Often grows fruit the first year. From Israel.

Braeburn
Blooms April. Medium to large green fruit with burgundy stripes. Crisp with sweet, slightly tart flesh. Excellent fresh or cooked. Harvest September-October. Excellent quality, stores well. From New Zealand.

Fuji Red
Blooms April. Medium to large slightly flattened fruit with yellowish green skin covered with grayish red stripes. Crisp, very juicy, and honey sweet. Needs heavy thinning for high quality fruit. Best eaten fresh. Ripens in October. Stores well. From Japan. OUR MOST POPULAR APPLE!

Gala
Blooms April. Small to medium size fruit with yellow skin and scarlet stripes. Fine texture flesh is crisp, aromatic and spicy sweet. Best eaten fresh. Harvest August-September. Unusually susceptible to fireblight. From New Zealand. POPULAR

Golden Delicious
Blooms April. Medium to large fruit with yellow (sometimes blushed pink) skin. The pale yellow flesh is crisp, sweet and flavorful. Ripens in September. Does not store well. (Market fruit is mealy)

Granny Smith
Blooms April. Medium to large round fruit with yellow green skin. the white flesh is firm, crisp, juicy, and tart. Eaten fresh or cooked. Harvest November-January. If left on the tree until mid-winter it becomes a fabulous sweet yellow-skinned apple. Stores very well. From Australia. Seems to be free from fireblight and apple worms. EXCELLENT!

Honeycrisp
Blooms April. Large fruit with yellow skin blushed red. Extremely crisp, juicy, coarse, subacid and aromatic. Ripens September, possibly earlier. From U of Minnesota. NEW! This is an outstanding apple that we expect to do well locally.

Jonagold
Blooms April. Large rounded fruit with yellow skin and red stripes. Cream colored flesh is firm, crisp, juicy with outstanding flavor. Harvest September. Excellent fresh or cooked. Pollinator is recommended. OUTSTANDING!


Pink Lady
Blooms April. Small to medium fruit with yellow green skin heavily blushed with rose. The white flesh is crisp, very sweet, and highly flavored. Harvest October-December. From Australia. GREAT NEW APPLE

Pink Pearl
Blooms April. Medium size fruit with pale green skin with slight red blush. The unusual pink flesh is highly aromatic with a sweet tart flavor. Ripens early fall. Good keeper. Best with pollinator. Pink flowers.

Spitzenberg
Blooms April. Yellow skin overlaid with red. The yellowish flesh is very firm, very dense, quite sweet, with superior strong flavor. Perhaps the best tasting of all apples. Best with pollinator. OLD VARIETY

Well, after doing some in depth research, it appears that I have between 350 and 450 chill hours where I'm located. The 350 is for the hills around me, but they say that the valley where I am is more like 400-450. I suspect I'm at the higher end of the range due to being sheltered by the mountain that I mentioned in my previous post. Anyway, to me this is good news since I didn't know how many frost hours.

Phillip

I have tried both Honeycrisp and Pink Lady from the grocery store and both are on par with the taste of Fuji--crisp, sweet, juicy--I don't remember which one, but I think it was the Honeycrisp that was almost too sweet. I don't think either of them keep as well as a Fuji---just my opinion.

Years ago, in the dark ages, my favorite apple was a Red Delicious. It was difficult to be sure that the ones you purchased were nice and hard/crisp. Today I NEVER purchase them; I have completely given up on Red Delicious. This year the only apples I purchase from the store are Honey Crisp. I have five apple trees on my farm, (all different varieties), and would like to add a Honey Crisp tree this spring. Due to Skeet's recommendation I will buy a Fuji, and compare it to Honey Crisp. Like they say, "Nothing ventured nothing gained."- Millet

That is where our or the producer's mileage could vary. Climate can affect the taste of your apple fruits. Just like citruses, the diurnal pattern of temperature of California and Florida. Even within California, there are different pattern of temperature in the foothills than in the Valley. The best apples are grown in the foothills of California.

Yes, Fuji is a good keeper if you know the basics of storing apples. But nothing beats Pink Lady when storing. The Pink Lady can be stored for up to a year. When you cut it open for salad mixes, the pink lady doesn't turn brown. When it comes to taste, a properly ripened Pink Lady is the best apple that I have tasted in my yard. It has the perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. Like Fuji, the Pink Lady is well suited to the very hot climate of the inland Valley of California.

There is one major drawback of Pink Lady is that you will have to diligently watch out for fireblight. It is a fireblight magnet. Another thing that I don't like about Pink Lady is that the blooms are prolonged, more than 30 days, the blooms are continuous, and it means, I'm going to be spraying copper sulfate every 3 to 4 days to minimize fireblight. It is the last apple to "ripen" in my yard, sometimes reaching until first week of December. Then comes the roof rats and the birds. You will be the only fanatic that have apples left on the tree, and those animals will come and dine as they please when you're not around. And if anything survives after that, you will be truly rewarded. So I harvest mine a little bit early, store them in the fridge for a month, then take them out to ripen, and truly the flavor is the best after they ripen.

I agree with Millet about Red Delicious-- I may have bought 1 last yr just for the color in a salad.

My son spent a yr in Japan and when he was about to leave he said the thing he would miss the most was Fuji apples (he had never seen them here before he went to Japan)-- he was glad to see them in the store when he got back. I can't say I gave either Pink Lady or Honeycrisp time to go bad, but I have had Fuji around for months and I have never bought a bad one any time of yr. To me all three are very good apples.

Well gentlemen, you've corrupted me. My wife hates this forum and is ready to call the paddy wagon to haul me away. After finding out that I can't get the Golden Dorsett in the area and Raintree is out of the Fuji on EMLA 27 rootstock, I decided to go back to Home Depot and get a Fuji on a "semidwarf" rootstock since I saw a few there in their bareroot section when I was looking for the Golden Dorsett. Being late this evening and dark in the corner of the nursery I had a hard time locating the Fuji. I decided that with all of my bad luck this weekend, they probably sold all of the Fujis in stock. Getting desperate, I started reaching for the back row of trees squinting to read the tags in the dark when alas, I found a tag that said Fuji. But wait, there were four other cultivar tags on the tree. Some dumb kid when his parents weren't watching put a bunch of tags on one tree (could have been one of my kids).

So I bought the tree, came home giggling, and went into the house. "Did you find a tree dear", my wife said.

Laughing, I replied, "Yes, but don't get mad at me."

"What now?"

"Umm . . . I bought 5 trees".

"What?!?!?"

(More laughter from me)

It turns out that buried way in the back of the trees was a 5 in 1 apple tree with a Fuji on it being sold along the rest of the bareroot trees for $18. I'm now a proud owner of a Fuji, Granny Smith, Gravenstein, Yellow Delicious, and Red Delicious on a "semi-dwarf" rootstock. I don't know that I will have the chill hours for the others, but I'm willing to experiment. I also figure that by the time the tree gets to size, I'll outgrow our house and we'll be moving east where there's cooler temps.

In the mean time, I found another forum where a guy grows apple trees right on the coast here in San Diego. He said that someone showed him a trick that will help with apples in low chill areas by "pulling the leaves off of the apple and pear trees in the Fall, when you prune them. I have no idea why it works, but it seems to make a difference and the trees seem to bloom more heavily in the spring."

Has anyone else heard of doing this?

Phillip

Skeet, if you bought the genuine Pink Lady and Fuji Apples, cut them open side by side and let stand for an hour, it will definitely tell you which one would be a good keeper after checking their colors.

Fuji Apple, I have one big standard tree, have of which have been grafted to perhaps more than 50 kinds of apples by now, and for pink lady apples, I have two separate trees and have resisted multi-grafting them.

Pink Lady and Fuji are my mainstay apples. They would supply me whole year apples if only I have the storage space. These apples are hot, and so they don't really last long as my friends always come for apple harvest party in September through November.

The rest of my apples are for wine-making.

I am also evaluating various pink-fleshed apples, kind of like the pigmented orange equivalent in citruses. And I have assembled one such apple tree whose apple's flesh are anything but white, just like assembling a pigmented orange tree whose fruit flesh is anything but orange.

Try me, I'm full of tricks when it comes to challenging the "REQUIRED" chilling hours...

But first, immediately graft over the Red Delicious with Golden Dorsett. I can save you a scionwood if you'd like and you can actually graft a newly planted tree if you graft over a big limb. Usually the Red delicious would be the most lethargic branch and granny smith would be vigorous. So you have a lot of balancing act to do in the future. Just PM me if you wanted scionwood of Golden Dorsett.

Now for the general tricks of forcing your apples to bloom in low chill areas:

Defoliation in the fall. You can manually pluck the leaves after the first frosts comes, or you can apply defoliation sprays.

Force or train the branch horizontally by adding weights. Horizontal branches will bloom much quicker too.

If you are adventurous, you can do bark inversion, it can add some equivalent chilling hours too.

You can apply dormex, but that's a big no-no for this group, and you may scare away the neighborhood. You will have to don safety hazardous suit after passing a license exam for an applicator's permit.

Always remove the vigorous branches and maintain the lethargic ones. This keeps your tree small, but they will bloom earlier too. Again, it depends upon the stage of your plant. You may need the vigorous ones to achieve your desired structure first before you select for the less vigorous ones.

Bring the tree (if in pots) to the northern yard to be shaded by the house in the winter but exposed to the elements at night.

You can also lay the tree horizontally over a flat glass during the winter. Remember how frost forms over a shiny hard surface, ie, like the windshield of a car when the plants are not frosted, but you have to scrape ice? Keeping your tree there will surely have additional chilling hours even if it doesn't frost. It is called radiation balance. Shinier surfaces will lose more radiative heat than they can gain.

You can also add a misting setup over your tree. Turn on the misting setup during the evening until half an hour past sunrise. The evaporative cooling effect of misting setup will add hours in the perfect range for chilling. The misting setup is not a heavy user of water. Just run it only when you don't have adequate chilling hours by mid-to late January in your area. In the best of case, you can hold water in a big container where you can dump ice. Use the ice water in your misting setup using a small electric pump. You can have the misters strategically placed over your tree, it doesn't matter how large is your tree as long as you have enough misting setup. The iced water and the enhance evaporative cooling effect would earn you chilling hours even in a tropical climate.

And if you're as crazy as me, you can also make a chilling box like this one here. But beware, you need to enclose most of the fruiting spurs of the tree, thus this setup is good for columnar apples and ultradwarf plants: http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4148728&a=31022367&f=

It is interesting that pulling leaves will add chill hours-- I am beginning to believe that it is more a matter of rest or sleep time that trees need so that the growth buds can begin their transformation to blossoms. I think that is why drought stress works in citrus just like chill hours--it helps impose a rest period.

There is more to chilling hours of deciduous fruit trees than the simple 32 to 45 deg F counting of chilling hours. And plants really adapt given the time and they bloom in marginal climates that supposedly lack some chilling hours.

A case of about more than two years ago, when had a strong El Nino year, we had series upon series of "pineapple express" (jet stream coming from direction of Hawaii) rains that dumps warm water during most days of winter. Most of high chill crops supposedly should not bloom as we only reached about 500 to 600 chilling hours, but they bloomed nonetheless. It was thought that the rains helped dilute or remove the bloom inhibitors too. But these are just some puzzles in the blooming of crops.

Thus I only take the chilling hours as very general guideline, and never treat it as an exact rule. Have been pushing my crop cultivation in both directions. Bananas on one end and extremely high chill on another, in a place called Davis.

I would strongly recommend whip and tongue graft over the stem of red delicious, or perhaps a simple wedge or cleft graft like this:
http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4148728&a=31606026&f=