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Old 14-10-2010, 12:19 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
Posts: 1,340
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BUT - is there any way of saving these trees, short of taking cuttings from them to graft? Someone proposed digging them up and moving them to another site, but they're probably too old.
Why do you want to save them? All sorts of reasons not to do this:
1- If I had a spot to plant (another) apple tree, I'd want to choose carefully what variety I wanted, what rootstock it was on, etc, not accept some tree that just happens to be available.
2- Moving a mature tree is likely to be expensive, requiring machinery or huge amounts of back-breaking work, probably a lot cheaper and easier to buy something bare-rooted or container grown from a nursery (and probably the tree will be set back so waiting for a nursery tree to establish won't be much slower)
3- Apple trees wear out eventually, are these young enough to be worth the bother of moving
So unless you have cheap access to machinery enabling you to move them easily, and either this is some very special variety, or you have people with space who would want these trees regardless of what they are, I'm not sure that attempting to move them is worthwhile, sad as that may be.