When to let crab apples bear fruit.

Gross144

A good 3 year old buck
Question for the apple tree experts. I bought a few crabs from whitetail crabs in 2019. They were planted 2020. Since i have had them they have continually produced flowers every year. Each year i pinched off the flowers so they would not produce fruit.
How many years do i continue pinching off flowers before i let them fruit. These are just for wildlife. I have 4 small foodplots that the deer and turkey visit so the crabs will hopefully be icing on the so called cake.
 
When the trees are big enough to be out of the deers reach is what I shoot for. The purpose for pinching the flowers off is so they put on growth quicker to get some size on the trees. Guessing those trees will be about there depending on how well they have grown. I will pick them off as long as I can on some of my trees just because I want the tree as big as possible before the bears start creating havoc with them. Hopefully you don’t have a bear problem where you are.
 
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I base it on when the tree can actually produce enough apples to be worth it for deer. If the tree is only going to produce 15-20 apples then there’s no sense in wasting energy on fruit production. The deer and other critters will eat them in a day or 2. If it’s going to produce 150 apples that’s When it’s starts getting worth it. In my opinion. I don’t think it would hurt it that much anyways to let it fruit out and see what happens. If you’ve got several then you could experiment with one or two.
 
I dont worry about it for crab apples much, most grow like weeds anyway. For regular apples that can take a bit more time to grow might be worth the effort.

Disclaimer: I grow mostly crabapple bareroots in tubes and they shoot up quick that way. Once they get 7 or 8 ft tall they get restaked and a cage put around them. First time they blossom maybe a doz or two blooms. By 3rd yr of blossoms 10x that.
 
Years 1 trough 4, I leave a few just to see what they look like and when they drop. By year 5 I don't worry any longer and just let the tree go. There are always exceptions, so if the tree is still really small keep pinching the blossoms until it get puts some decent size to it.
 
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Years 1 trough 4, I leave a few just to see what they look like and when they drop. By year 4 I don't worry any longer and just let the tree go. There are always exceptions, so if the tree is still really small keep pinching the blossoms until it get puts some decent size to it.

I do about the same as this, except year 3, I let them bear fruit. Around me I have bear problems, but they don’t seem to care if there is fruit on them or not, they will just wreck them to be a dick.
 
Around me I have bear problems, but they don’t seem to care if there is fruit on them or not, they will just wreck them to be a dick.
We have bears, and they like apples. But as 4W said above - bears will do things just for the heck of it. They seem to like to reach up to grab low limbs just to pull down on them - fruit or not - and there goes your tree. Bears are curious like kids. Anything that makes noise, moves, or has a new smell will get their attention. Examples at our camp ...... poly tarps covering the tops of wood piles, surveyor's tape flagging for tree markers, tree cages. All have been play-toys for bears and sustained damage in the past. One poly tarp was dragged 100 yds. from the woodpile it had laid on top of.

Good luck with your crab apple trees.
 
Before cell cams, I use to have problems with bear wrecking my cameras, tearing them off the trees. They would usually do it the night, or the next day after I pulled pictures from the sd cards. I assumed it was my scent that led them to the cameras. Now that I have all cell cams, they rarely mess with them at all. I will get them sniffing them on occasions, but I have only lost 1 cell cam to bears in 5 years, compared to 1-2 a year of non cell cams.
 
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