How to Grow Apple Tree - Full Guide 15 Minute Read - Tree My Life

well hello everyone and welcome to another very exciting complete growing guide here on the my gardener Channel hopefully you all are going to enjoy this one because in this episode we're ( Apple tree )

 talking about apples now apples are my favorite one of my favorite plants to grow peaches my number one albums are probably close second even though I can't eat them raw because I am allergic I know it's very unfortunate but they're just there's something about an apple tree that's just( Apple tree)

 so I don't very beautiful it's very elegant in the garden and so how I always love growing them even though I can't eat them I just well I can eat them cooked I just put them in in pies and we make our own apple jelly and there's so many cool things to do with them for sure and and Cindy misses Emma Gardner enjoys them as well so definitely definitely fun one to grow but it's something that I think a lot of times people 

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overcomplicate apples are certainly one of the more easy fruit trees that there is to grow really there's only a few things you have to remember so we're going to go through all those now the first one is as always when you plant your your fruit tree you want to make sure that you dig the hole about two-and-a-half times the size of the root ball that makes sure that there's lots of very loose soil for the roots to move through apple trees 

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specifically are extremely slow when it comes to deciduous fruit tree growth your peach trees your cherry trees even your pear trees have quite fast root growth but with apples I find that they are just really slow and you'll you'll find that the thing that kills them off the most is just inadequate root growth so you want to make sure that you 

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encourage that root growth as much as possible when you first plant them by making sure that the soil is very loose well draining rich in organic matter it's going to do that also another thing that we always say when it gets we'll get to the fertilizing but I never ever ever ever fertilize my fruit trees with anything you know a fertilizer until after three months of growth but in this case with

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 apples I actually wait five months because they are so slow with most of our actually all of our fruit trees but our apples I'll be able to fertilize them to get them growing fast after about three months but with apples I wait five months but we'll get into that fertilizing in just a bit um so yeah you want to make sure the soil is really loose full of organic matter very well draining you don't want any rot or anything like that apples are definitely prone to to root rot also more than most plants as well so 

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they're very easy to grow when you just take care of a few of those things um the next thing is you also want to make sure that the that the apple tree has very good weight bearing so weight bearing branches are very very important to have and you want to print out any non weight bring branches so one of the things we look for is a V if they have a V in the branch that is a weak point and that 

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branches is almost doomed to snap you want anything that is greater than 65 degrees so the more ninety degrees it is the stronger it's going to be because that weight can bend and it's not going to break as easily so a lot of these 

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45-degree branches we're going to actually train them using weights to to be more like more like 75 90 degrees if if we could give them that low but but yeah so you just want to make sure that if you do have any really strong really you know strong upward growth what you want to do is try pruning first first and foremost that's the that's the first 

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thing you can do is prune the top lateral growth to or the upward growth to promote that lower lateral growth on some of these lower branches you want to get some some lateral growth going and then what you can do is then you can take string and I like to take just regular Baker's string and I will tie off at the at the very end of the branch and I'll take tent stakes and I will tent stake down and I will tie

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 it off until the until the tree just basically says okay I'm not going to try fighting this anymore I'm just going to grow like this and it will pretty much just it won't it won't pretty much it will just stay like that once it starts to stiffen up its bark and that outer cambium layer kind of just stiffens up you'll have a very good strong branch so you don't have 

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to prune all of your 45-degree branches you can train them to be more of like a 90 degree branch and that's that's typically what we do to reduce the amount of pruning we have to do because we find that about one out of every six branches is enough to to carry the weight of a future fruit now one thing that is always important to talk about is having a cross apples need a cross so you don't 

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have to necessarily have you don't necessarily have to have like three or four different apple trees just having one other apple tree is I can't say mandatory because typically there's a lot of different apple trees in the area that are wild apple trees that will cross but to have really good 

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guaranteed success I do stress having a second tree so even though we don't consume a lot of apples here we still put a second one in just for measure of having good production and so we have a Honeycrisp here and we have a gala over there and that way when the honeybees and the the different pollinators come they're going to 

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cross that pollen and it's going to increase your production the next thing comes to fertilizing now when it comes to fertilizing your tree again I said this in the beginning you do not want to fertilize in the in the first five months and fertilize is different than giving it some just a little bit of feeding so what we do is we make compost tea and worm 

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tea very very very gentle fertilizers to simply feed the plant promote some growth but not actually to stop development all together roots have a main goal and that's to find nutrients in water and the plant will send those roots out to try to find those nutrients in water and if you feed the roots right at the base the roots are not encouraged to go out and with deciduous trees they need that go 

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dormant you need to send the roots way down deep past the the frost zone where they can be protected so even on the coldest of winters they're going to survive now with your apple trees a lot of times people ask kind of what zone can they survive and that kind of gets into cold hardiness um you can grow your apple trees in anything on a below zone for Sol zone four down to about zone eight maybe nine now after zone nine you lose your chill hours as we talked about with 

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cherries if you saw that girl guy having chill hours are very very very important to to fruit production if the tree does not get chill hours there's no reset period and it will simply grow so you can grow fruit trees in Southern California like apples but since there's no chill hours it's going to have a hard time resetting and saying hey winter has come and now it's time to produce more flowers with apple

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 trees they need about 500 to 800 chill hours so that's why a lot of your apples are grown in colder climates like Washington and and Michigan are huge apple producers because of that region because of that reason because they just get those really good chill hours that are required to give a kind of a hard reset to the plant to say hey let's put out lots of fruit now so definitely zone 3 zone 4 to zone 8 is is great zone 3 we you could

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 try it with some of your very cold hardy varieties but it's definitely hit or miss for sure and then the very final thing that I want to talk about was watering um so when you water you want to make sure that you give them when you first plant them a gallon everyday for the first three weeks after those three weeks a gallon every other day for two weeks after those two weeks make sure they

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 get a gallon a week and that way they just stay unstressed and they're going to do fine they're going to grow they're going to do very well for you and and then in the spring you see beautiful white flowers now with apples specifically I don't let them flower the first year I was from our peach trees and our cherry trees and things like that if they flower that's fine because the flowers actually 

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come after growth with our apple trees I will actually stop them from flowering the first year because the fruit is so large and it takes so much energy away and the and like I said the root development is so slow on apples that I don't want to sacrifice that by saying hey you know let's get let's get five to ten apples on this tree you know at the at the cost at the expense of losing it so what 

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I'll do is I'll go through here and when I see the flowers I'll pick them off and I won't allow the tree to flower the first year but the next year you can totally let it flower it's going to be great and that's just optional to you decide if you want to do it or not I find that I've had very very good success with 

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it by doing that and it certainly reduces the amount of stress that it has on the tree so anyways that's all you need to know about growing apples or most of that you think I pretty much touch on everything if you have any questions Oh sun exposure almost forgot so a sun exposure with all your fruit trees it'll include it 

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make sure they get at least eight hours you need eight hours of full Sun to do really well the tag tags will always go on the lower side don't follow the fruit tags I never follow them because he just are they're pointless they they they kind of they always err on the side of light can we sell this tree so they'll say you know six hours because most people have six hours I recommend eight hours to have good fruit production six hours is just not 

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enough and so you'll do much better with eight hours these will actually get around ten to twelve hours which is awesome so make sure they get good full Sun and and that's it now that is just about everything to growing fruit to growing apple trees if you have any more questions post them in the comments box below I'd be glad to answer 

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them and also make sure to check out our other growing guides over at my gardener com you can go to the media tab we have videos tons of free growing guides I think we have almost 30 now complete growing guides on fruits and vegetables now which is awesome and we're going to be adding to them every day which is wonderful so our least weekly oh oh yeah I'm having a good 

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day cold may be getting to me a little bit but we will talk to y'all later hopefully you all having a great day hopefully you all are remembering to grow big or go home and this is Luke from neon my trees site I'll see you later bye