Crabapple Vigor Issue / Questions

[bigbendmarine]

Two years ago I planted 18 dolgo crabapples.

I spoke in an earlier post as to how I tubed versus caged them and in hindsight would NOT have as last year I had tons of root sucker / water sprout growth (limbs growing off lower trunk of rootstock) that robbed almost all growth from the grafted dolgo. Didn't appreciate the scope of the problem until I opened the tubes this winter.

I pruned all the root stock growth earlier in the spring before the trees broke dormancy and ALL of the dolgos now have some leaves on the scion section of the tree... but not that many leaves wheraeas the root stock trunk section is already pushing out rather vigorous growth again.

Is continual pruning the only thing that one can do? Definitely hoping that I can keep the dolgos alive / tops true and not lose them to robbed vigor from the base. Any / all info greatly appreciated.

 

[Prof.Kent]

I have grafted apples to flowering crab trees. Always had to fight the numerous new growth suckers from the native crab. Over and over again. Eventually, as the tree grows the sun light does not hit the original trunk so much and the grafted branches take over more. What do you have better to do? :-)

 

[yoderjac]

I had the same thing happen with the seedlings that I tubed. I fortunately caged them for protection. I had a bunch of old used 18" tubes. I figured they would be good for rodent protection. Bad idea. I got all kinds of water sprouts growing in the tube. All I can figure is that in the early spring, the environment in the tube is much better than the general environment. The plant must somehow figure that out and direct a lot of its growth to that favorable climate. I removed the tubes and pruned mine. Fortunately I caught it in the first year. They are now growing in more of a normal growth pattern. I still get a few suckers but not like when I had tubes on them. I can only imagine how taller tubes would affect them.

I don't have a good solution for you. Another issue I ran into when grafting to crabapple seedlings is the relative green-up time between the rootstock and scion. Siberian leaf out almost a month before many domestic apple varieties. When I field grafted these trees, they really wanted to push out growth through the root stock. It took me several tries for some trees. I've noticed that the few branches I left below the graft leaf out very early, but the domestic apple varieties seem to be growing fine above the graft.

Thanks,

Jack