echinosum wrote:
someone;902391 Wrote:

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.

Quite. Many of these trees are likely to be of varieties which are *NOT*
available - or of unknown variety.

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)

Yes expensive. Yes, effort. But if carefully replanted, there should be
a crop on the following year.

3- Apple trees wear out eventually, are these young enough to be worth
the bother of moving

The original Bramley's seedling is still going strong, and AFAIK, cropping.

As they say across the pond - go figure.

--
Rusty