(Located E5, S24) Some years, juice traps are used with good results. Mowing under the trees has proven effective in helping to control damage from moles and voles. OMRI horticultural sprays are sometimes used for scab and scale control.
History of Disease Resistant Varieties In the Fruit Garden
For more than 30 years Dr. Robert Norton maintained a test block of disease resistant apple varieties here at the WSU Mt. Vernon station. These were numbered selections from New York Fruit Testing and from the PRI program from Purdue, Rutgers and Illinois universities. These selections were made by crossing flavorful cultivars with scab immune cultivars. Dr. Norton grafted these numbered selections on dwarf rootstocks and then fruited each variety. He, Gary Moulton, Jacky King and Les Price then reported back as to which varieties did well here. Eventually the Universities released the best of these disease resistant varieties. Many of these are now mature trees in our fruit garden. Among these are Prima, Freedom, Liberty, Pristine, William’s Pride, Spartan, Enterprise and others..
These variety trials were supported for decades by our fruit garden group, the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation (WWFRF) which operates this fruit garden. The fruit tree variety testing stopped about 15 years ago. Many of the varieties in our fruit garden were selected as a result of monitoring these fruit variety trials.
Our organization has been supporting the WSU Mt. Vernon station for almost 35 years. For all these years most of our volunteers have been working on growing our trees as organically as possible. We financially supported Dr. Norton’s variety trials of disease resistant varieties which made scab resistant cultivars available to nurseries and to the gardening public.
Our garden needs to demonstrate fruit trees that are free of disease. So we have developed a spray program with WSU for most of the garden based on IPM, Integrated Pest Management. We don’t use herbicides but instead use mulching and mowing to control weeds.
