Garden

Kolonovidnye apple: planting, care, pruning

The eternal problem of summer residents is the lack of space. I want to plant a lot, but the site has borders, you need to carefully plan the distribution of the area. If it is possible to conduct experiments in the garden at least every year, this number will not work with the garden.

Each tree requires enough space for the root system and the crown. For such cases, there are columnar fruit trees, which take up little space due to the fact that they have one trunk and no crown. This article will tell you how to grow a columnar apple and how to care for it.

  • Colony Apple: General Description
  • Landing features
    • Sun or shade
    • General landing rules
  • How to care for trees, tips on growing
    • Watering colony varieties
    • Feeding fruit
    • Nuances trimming
    • Collapse of colonic plants
    • Crop normalization
  • How to protect apple trees in winter
  • Pros and cons of the cultivation of columnar apple

Colony Apple: General Description

Kolonovidnye, or pyramidal apple trees appeared in the middle of the last century as a result of random hybridization, which found them engaged in their selection. The columnar apple has one trunk, on it, instead of shoots of Kolchatka,fruits and spears, which is the formation of flower buds. Fruiting lasts an average of 15 years.

Did you know? The farmer, who found a strange hybrid, was called Viichik, and his half-century-old apple tree with an unusual branch was Macintosh. Thus, the first cultivated variety of the columnar apple was called “Macintosh Viichik”. But in Russian-language terminology, the name was deformed in "Macintosh Leader".

Landing features

The seedling of a columnar apple should not be older than a year, otherwise it will be worse to take root. If you plant several plants at the same time, you need to have them at a distance of half a meter to a meter from each other.

Kolonovidnye apple do not like:

  • drafts;
  • shadow;
  • proximity of groundwater.
To get a high and high-quality crop of apples, you need to know how to whip the columnar apple trees in the garden, to properly care for and prune, to fight pests and diseases.

Sun or shade

The columnar apple should be planted in the place where it will receive enough sun, since it is very light-loving. Ideally position it near the southern wall of the house so that the sun, moving from east to west, illuminates it all day.In the shadow of the columnar apple is strongly drawn out.

General landing rules

Colon-shaped apple trees, like all fruit trees, can be planted in spring before woody juices awake. But planting a columnar apple in the fall is preferable; it will give the plant the opportunity to adapt and overwinter.

Did you know? If you purchase seedlings in a tub, you can plant out columnar fruit trees with a clod of earth in the summer.

How to plant a columnar apple, step by step instructions.

  1. Over the past few weeks, prepare a pit for a sapling. It should be deep, a meter deep, wide and long. When digging, fertile soil should be folded separately from the barren soil.
  2. Place gravel and sand drainage at the bottom of the pit.
  3. Mix the fertile part of the soil with 30-40 liters of humus or compost, add 100 g of superphosphate and potash fertilizer, 100 g of dolomite flour should be added to the condition of acidic soil, mix and lay in the pit. Leave for two weeks.
  4. Plant an apple tree in the prepared soil, cover it with barren soil from the pit, making sure that the root collar is above the surface.
  5. Form a hole around the tree, pour two buckets of water into it.
  6. After absorbing the water, start the barrel circle. For mulching suitable grass, peat, sawdust.
  7. Tie the tree to the support, if necessary.
Important! During transportation, the roots of the seedling should not dry out!

When spring planting, the pits should be prepared in autumn, so that the fertilizers dissolve, the soil coalesces and the roots fall into a favorable situation.

Did you know? Coloniform varieties of apple trees are extremely skoroplodny: a seedling planted in spring can bloom in the first year. In this case, it is better to completely remove the ovary, so that the tree is fully adapted and gain strength.

How to care for trees, tips on growing

Colon-shaped apple trees look great, their planting is compact and takes up little space, they give a good harvest, but they require careful maintenance, timely watering and feeding, loosening the soil and removing weeds.

Did you know? Kolonovidnye apple trees can live up to half a century, but they bear fruit for about 15 years.

It happens that the care of the columnar apple causes difficulties for gardeners. So, sometimes the apical bud is damaged, which is the growth point of a tree that has one trunk and does not have a crown.The most common cause of damage is freezing.

The death of the kidney leads to an increase in "spare" shoots. Then the tree will grow into several trunks. If you want it to be strictly compact form in one trunk, from the additional shoots, you must choose one of the strongest, remove the rest.

Watering colony varieties

The root-shaped apple trees have a fibrous root system, it is located close to the surface, therefore the plants require regular moistening. Watering method is better to choose drip.

Important! Watering should be moderate: excess moisture will block access of oxygen to the roots, which will lead to the death of the tree.

If the summer weather is normal, water the young apples should be twice a week, if arid - every other day, or even daily. Mature trees can be watered less often. By the end of the summer it is recommended to stop watering, to give the plant the opportunity to prepare for winter.

Did you know? In the dry summer, once every two weeks in the evening it is recommended to “bathe” the columnar apple trees: plentifully water the trees with a hose, imitating rain.

Feeding fruit

After the leaves bloom, the plant needs fertilizer.Top dressing of columnar apple trees is done in spring, at the beginning of the growing season. Then it should be repeated twice more at two-week intervals.

It is recommended to feed:

  • chicken litter solution;
  • mullein solution;
  • urea;
  • saltpeter;
  • complex fertilizer.

Nuances trimming

It is believed that the columnar apple trees, if they are properly cared for, will grow in one stem, and pruning will not be required. This is not entirely true, since the colonial apple tree still produces side shoots.

It happens that the growing point is damaged, as a result of which new shoots grow. Everyone decides for himself how to form a columnar apple.

Did you know? The more removed during pruning, the more actively the cropped fragment will grow. If you grab a branch more than half, it will give several powerful shoots, if it has a third cut off, there will be a lot of weak processes that are easy to remove.

Pruning apple trees are pruned in spring, early summer or autumn. The whole procedure takes several years.

Pruning the apple tree, the scheme and dates by year:

  1. 1 year. Remove all side shoots, shorten the trunk.
  2. 2 year. Pinch young shoots that have reached 30 cm.Do not touch the upper shoot with the growth point.
  3. 3 year. Shorten the upper shoot to 25 cm from the trunk, lateral to 40 cm.
  4. 4 year. Thaw thin lateral shoots and irregular shoots.
  5. 5 year. Shorten the tree. A height of 3 meters is recommended.
  6. Subsequent years. Remove weak and dried shoots.

Important! Pruning a columnar apple stimulates the yield and growth of new branches.

How to prune an apple tree:

  • Cut branches should have two buds at the base. Trimming produce a very sharp clean shears at an angle of 45 degrees per centimeter from the kidney. It will be appropriate to practice on unnecessary boughs.

  • Crop preferably shoots under the age of one year.

  • Actively growing unnecessary shoots in the middle of summer to pinch.

  • Fix the apical shoot, the rest to turn into links that will bear fruit.

Collapse of colonic plants

Due to the fibrous root system, the columnar apple trees, in addition to abundant watering, need protection against evaporation of water from the soil. The solution to the problem can be mulching with humus or peat. The best option is the tincture of the wheel circle.

With this method, the space around the tree is sown with herbs or cereals.The vegetative cover closes the ground from the sun, and is not itself a competitor to the apple because of the shallow roots. However, it should be regularly thinned, if it is spicy herbs, and mowed, if the grass.

Crop normalization

From the huge number of ovaries, which produces a columnar apple, it is impossible to get a full harvest.

If the apple tree blossomed in the first year, the whole color needs to be removed: the tree is too weak and it needs strength in order to adapt and grow strong. Next year, you can leave five of the most beautiful ovaries, in the third year - ten.

Near the columnar apple trees you can also plant compact columnar pears and plums, which do not take up much space in your garden.
At the flowering stage, about half of the flower bouquets are removed, at the stage of appearance of the ovary - another half of the bouquets, at the stage when the ovary reaches the size of a cherry, only two of the most beautiful are left, at the size stage of a walnut - one, the best.

How to protect apple trees in winter

Before the onset of winter frosts should take care of protection. If the tree trunk was muted with straw, it should be removed, it will be warm in it not only the apple tree, but also the mice. The latter is also satisfying.

You can cover sawdust, spruce, other materials at hand. The main thing is that they are dry. The best protection for the tree will be fallen snow, which should spud the apple tree.

Important! It should be understood that the main task in the event of protecting the columnar apple from frost is to prevent from getting wet and subsequent freezing of the roots, which are located quite close to the surface.

To protect the growth point from freezing, it is recommended to wrap it in several layers of cloth or paper.

To wind gusts did not break the plant, it is appropriate to tie it to a support.

Pros and cons of the cultivation of columnar apple

The advantages of the columnar apple trees are undoubtedly:

  • high yield;
  • compactness;
  • ease of harvesting;
  • the possibility of growing up to a dozen different varieties of apples on a plot that would take one ordinary apple tree;
  • resistance to pests;
  • decorative and originality of appearance.

The disadvantages include:

  • growth point fragility;
  • weak roots;
  • timely, constant and rather time-consuming care;
  • the cost of seedlings.
Each gardener, after reading the article and weighing the pros and cons, will make an opinion about the columnar apple trees. In their breeding lacks both advantages and disadvantages, depending on what is considered as such.

There is no doubt that it is necessary to try if you want to have at least one such apple tree in your garden. It is likely that the columnar apple, no matter how troublesome it was planting and caring for it, would generously repay care with its decorative look and generous harvest.

Popular Categories, 2024