Hi I'm Jim Luby
I'm a professor in the Department of
Horticultural Science at the University
of Minnesota
and I'm here at our test orchard at the
North Central Research and Outreach
Center
in this orchard which you'll see around
me we test
the selections from our breeding program
as well as a number of varieties
that are maybe either new or have been
grown for many many years
in North Central Minnesota so
we plant trees regularly you can see
here some of the smaller younger trees
that we've just put in the last couple
years
and then we've got trees going back to
the beginning of this orchard
in the year 2000 one of the main things
we're looking for
in in this orchard is survival of our
winters
in Northern Minnesota and you can see
behind me here
some of the differences we see on this
side here we have the variety
Paula Red which actually was selected in
Michigan and you can see it's not
really too happy in our part of the
world here we've got a selection from
the University Minnesota Breeding
Program that's doing much better so this
is part of what we're trying to do here
is see some of these differences in how
well apple trees
survive the winter University of
Minnesota Apple Breeding Program has
been going since 1908
over 110 years and in that time there's
been 27
varieties introduced and not all of them
do well in Northern Minnesota
but this is one of the more recent ones
that has done very well in our tests
here
at the North Central Research and
Outreach Center this variety Zestar
which came out in the late 90s
1990s it's an early season apple so it
ripens
in North Central Minnesota before we get
our first killing frost
and then as you can see from the tree
around me it
has stayed very healthy in this case
through about 20 winters
in addition to our Minnesota climate one
of the other big challenges we have to
growing apples in Minnesota
is that other animals like them just
about as much as we do
and in virtually all the state we've got
to be worried about deer
coming into an orchard and in this part
of Minnesota we've even got to be
worried about
black bears coming into the orchard too
so
what's going to be necessary to grow
apples in Minnesota
is some kind of exclusion fencing and
this is the example we use here
typically the fences should be some kind
of woven wire product
and about 10 feet tall to keep deer from
jumping over them
and then going down at the bottom all
the way to the ground to make sure that
the deer
do not also try to get under them all
apple varieties are
grafted onto a rootstock we call this
Clonal Propagation or Asexual
Propagation and this way we get an exact
copy of the variety
what this means is that a
stick of one of the varieties is
actually used
to graft onto a root system of another
variety
and we use different what we call root
stocks
for two reasons one of them is
to get a hearty rootstock that can
survive
cold soil temperatures and another
reason is to get dwarfing and we can see
that here in the orchard
right behind me here is a dwarf tree
grafted on b9 rootstock and one of the
it makes for a nice tree that i can
reach almost all of
just from the ground one thing they do
require though
is support with a stake or something
like it to be sure that they will stand
up even
in wind storms and with a heavy crop
load that we might get
we can also use semi-dwarf fruit stock
which you'll see
back in the row behind me and
that will give a tree that's more in the
range of about 15 feet tall
and but it has the advantage of being
able to stand on its own without
a stake for support so there's
advantages disadvantages to both kinds
of root stock
you can see this healthy row of apple
trees which was planted in
the year 2000 represents some of the
more hearty varieties we can grow in
Minnesota
many of these are actually derived from
a Siberian Crab Apple species
so some of them like this Rescue Crab
here
is going to have very small fruit but
will survive just about any Minnesota
winter
the fruit ripen early enough to be
harvested in
even our shorter seasons and then that
Siberian Crab also brings in the benefit
of giving us
some resistance to the fungal disease
Apple Scab
so in addition to evaluating the trees
of course we also want to evaluate the
fruit in our
testing program that's the part that
we're interested in eating
what we do is usually harvest at a
couple different
times on each tree to try to catch make
sure we catch
the fruit at the right stage of maturity
and then
that fruit is we we slice it we
look at its maturity based on actually
spraying some iodine on it which reacts
with the starch
and make sure that's at the right level
maturity and then
we basically have to test it for its
texture
and its flavor
