A sweet apple, or perhaps you prefer tangy? The consumption purpose and tastes may differ, but ultimately consumers want a firm apple with a fresh and flawless appearance. As a grower, you know that you can only achieve the highest yield and best quality through regularity of growth during the growing season. You achieve this by minimising stress conditions, as naturally as possible. It helps to increase plant resilience; make this a key pillar of your cultivation strategy.
To ensure your apple trees grow plenty of fruit every growing season, they must be kept in tip-top condition all year round. During the growing season, you can make a significant contribution to this. Ensure the trees benefit from a good balance of water, nutrition, light and temperature. Abiotic stress factors, such as heat, a lack of moisture or mineral deficiency can disrupt this growth balance. Other stress factors, such as apple scab and hail can also have a disruptive effect.
To ensure the growth balance reaches the desired level as soon as possible during the spring, and to keep it at this level, after flowering treat the apple trees with Ds-Mix every week for a three-month period. Ds-Mix is made up of three of our products: Ds-Lime, Cuprum and ManZincum.
Besides their own roles, Cuprum and ManZincum also support lime application. Both products improve and strengthen the effect of the lime, as they both stick to the leaves for longer.
Recommended dosage/advice for use - Ds-Mix in apple cultivation
To minimise the impact of stress factors during the growing season, we recommend spraying regularly with Ds-Mix. You prepare this mix by dissolving the following three products in 300 litres/ha of spray mixture.
1. Ds-Lime: 150 grams/100 l water
2. Cuprum: 0.5 l/ha
3. ManZincum: 0.75 l/ha
The order shown above is the recommended mixing order. To ensure that all products are mixed properly in the spray solution, it is important to use the agitator in the tank when adding the products.
Apple cultivation depends on the full growth of pollinated blossom during the spring. Frost can destroy the blossom. Spraying SalicylPure (willow bark extract) increases the carbohydrate levels in the cells. Blossom with higher carbohydrate levels is less susceptible to frosts at temperatures down to -5oC.
Recommended dosage/advice for use - SalicylPure for frost protection
Frost or a hefty hailstorm can cause, for example, wounds from broken branches and petioles. Spraying ArgicinPlus prevents the natural defence response of wound-induced ethylene formation, the wound will grow over and the apple tree will continue to actively grow.
Recommended dosage/advice for use - ArgicinPlus for wounds from broken branches
Our basic advice is to apply Ds-Mix to make apple trees as resilient as possible from flowering onwards. Despite your efforts, stressful conditions can start to increase again during the final weeks before harvest. If this is the case, don’t be caught unawares, spray with Argentum in good time prior to harvest. Repeat this weekly. Argentum is a fertiliser with CE marking which contains colloidal silver. This helps the trees to produce additional sugars, which increases the resilience of the apples. Research by Asperico with the variety Golden Delicious has demonstrated that increasing resilience has a positive effect on stress caused by fruit rot during storage.
Recommended dosage/advice for use - Argentum in apples
To store your harvested apples properly and for a long period of time all of the basic requirements must have been met – for example, clean crates and a clean cold store, so that storage diseases are not given a chance to develop. To ensure that clean really does mean clean, we recommend using ArgiPura. This is a ready-to-use cleaning product, developed specifically for this purpose, that contains a mixture of soap and traces of colloidal silver and micro-copper. You can add ArgiPura undiluted to the detergent tank of the high-pressure cleaning machine, then allowing it to mix with the water at a ratio of 1:100.
Questions or advice?
Do you have any additional questions, or would you like tailor-made advice concerning your own cultivation situation? Contact your dealer or our advisor Alwin Scholten. Alwin can be contacted on telephone number +31 (0)6 49 33 49 30, or by email on alwin.scholten@plantosys.nl.
Healthy, vigorous apple trees are high yielding. You can use our natural fertilisers and biostimulants to improve the growth balance of your fruit trees. The following applies to all of our products: residue-free, no growth inhibition, no re-entry restrictions and no safety term has to be taken into account at harvest. Our products are safe for organic crop protection.
