Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

"Default User" wrote in message
...

I have a crapapple tree that has shown some interesting behavior the
past couple years. Here's some history.

It's a fairly large tree, and when I got the house it was very lush. I
should have had it pruned then, as it turns out. In about 2000, a major
section split off from the main trunk and fell over. I had the whole
tree pruned and reshaped at the time, which reduced its size
considerably.

I was concerned over the following years that it might die, but it's
rallied and looks pretty good.

Now the odd part. Starting last year, one branch of the tree has
started to blossom in the fall. The last of them just fell off, so
figure around mid-September. This year's have set some fruit. I don't
know if the same branch blossomed in the spring when the rest of the
tree did, and as we had a spring freeze here I can't tell by looking
for mature fruit as they were all killed.

Has anyone heard of such a thing? To the best of my recollection, only
these two most recent years have shown this. The branch is close to the
driveway, so it's very noticable.


Someone may have grafted apples of a different variety on to the
crabapple tree. That used to be a big fad a number of years ago
and you can still buy trees online that have different branches of different
apples. Crabapple trees were a favorite to use for this since many
of them (particularly ones that aren't created purely as ornamental
trees) in the good old days were not grafted trees.

These days most ornamental crabapples are grafted and virtually
all production apple trees are grafted. But there's a movement out
there against grafted apple trees and some growers are selling
non-grafted ones.

Ted

I don't know what kind of movement you are referring to. Grafting is still
the only reliable way to reproduce apple trees. These ungrafted trees are
limited to a very few apples, like Antonovka, but this variety is used more
as a rootstock than an eating apple. Non-grafted trees take longer to
produce
fruit and eventually get too big to be managed properly.

Sherwin D.