The Tropical Fruit Forum

Temperate Fruit & Orchards => Temperate Fruit Discussion => Topic started by: koundog on March 04, 2018, 06:25:37 PM

Title: Low chill apple trees
Post by: koundog on March 04, 2018, 06:25:37 PM
Has anyone grown and fruited low chill apple varieties in south Florida I’m interested in maybe planting the Anna and golden Dorsett varieties in my yard am I wasting my time with these?
Title: Re: Low chill apple trees
Post by: Tropheus76 on March 05, 2018, 08:02:27 AM
I am in Northern Central FL in between Orlando and Cocoa and I have both and while I get a couple apples from each, apples are easily one of the slowest growing group of trees I have. Dorsett I believe comes from Jamaica(or maybe its Anna) and should eeek along like mine does. But don't expect anything great or massive. I am curious as to how this past winter's cold will improve things.

Two others you may want to check out that have been more productive than Anna and Dorsett for me are Tropic Sweet and Emshimer. Both are slightly more vigourous and have gotten more apples off them in three years than I have gotten off my A and Ds combined in 6.
Title: Re: Low chill apple trees
Post by: Jct on March 19, 2018, 03:44:01 PM
There's a whole thread on this:

http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=18476.0 (http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=18476.0)

Gala and Pixie Crunch have done well from me, but my conditions are a bit different from yours.
Title: Re: Low chill apple trees
Post by: scottsurf on March 28, 2018, 04:15:11 PM
in different climate but get little chill the only problem i have is  they are constanly flowering at any tempature change. like rigth now i have ripe apples on the tree and its flowering to. so have to pick baby fruit for it to grow but sets heavy crop .when mature. sometime hard for it to grow instead of fruit
Title: Re: Low chill apple trees
Post by: Jct on March 29, 2018, 01:04:58 PM
in different climate but get little chill the only problem i have is  they are constanly flowering at any tempature change. like rigth now i have ripe apples on the tree and its flowering to. so have to pick baby fruit for it to grow but sets heavy crop .when mature. sometime hard for it to grow instead of fruit
I've had that issue with my Pixie Crunch, last year it underwent a 2 month period of constant flowering, leading to a very long fruiting season.  It was nice that I had apples ripen over a fairly long period, but it made it tougher figuring out which ones were actually ripe.  It's still a young tree, so I only had about a dozen apples. Hoping for much more this year.
Title: Re: Low chill apple trees
Post by: SoCal2warm on April 06, 2018, 08:30:40 PM
In SoCal, climate zone 10, and even peach trees that you'll occasionally see in people's yards (Babcock, I'm assuming) don't seem to produce well here. I've only ever come across one apple tree with fruits, and they were very little apples.

But I did find this:

The latest reports have shown that apples tend to be more adaptable to lower-chill areas than was previously thought. A field test by Tom Spellman of Dave Wilson Nursery showed that several apple varieties rated for 800 chill hours could grow just fine in Irvine (located in coastal Southern California, which only gets 50-100 real chill hours). The following apple varieties did surprisingly well: King Tompkins, Braeburn, Gravenstein, Cox's Orange Pippin. The trees tended to flower and set fruit throughout the year rather than a specific season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiEEHRfAEWY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiEEHRfAEWY)

The results might have had something to do with the fact that the coastal influence has a moderating effect on temperature, and in the winter it rarely ever gets above 65 F in this region, higher temperatures being very detrimental to effective chill accumulation. In other words, the same moderating influence that prevents there from ever being any chill hours below 45 F may be, paradoxically, the same influence that allows the trees to grow well even in the absence of chill hours below 45 F.