[Steve Dagger]

Yes, thanks for the wild apple battle cry, Andy. For me, cider making will always be a blend of creatively combining what ever apples I have access to according to how they taste, smell and feel in the mouth and which wild yeasts manage to predominate in the must. No desire to create a uniform, marketable product. Just the satisfaction of, when I’m lucky, getting to taste (and share) some really good cider that I made myself.

[Steve Dagger]

Thanks for this post, Brittany. It helps put in context some of the canker issues I’ve been dealing with for years. I’m not as far along in identifying and trying to treat cankers in my orchard as you though I have modified my pruning some and excavated a few cankers on very young trees to prevent them from becoming girdled. I hope others will use this and related threads to share their experiences.

Pommes de Terre Acrea
Intermountain West Region

[Steve Dagger]

Sounds like some proactive control is warranted, Josh. According to recommendations I’ve seen online Dipel BT should work if applications are in sync with caterpillar feeding. Keep us posted on effectiveness and if you learn anything else useful.

[Steve Dagger]

A few bits of additional info that may be helpful to others: Tent caterpillars usually occur in the spring while related species of fall webworms occur in the fall. Both are sporadic pests; fairly easily controlled with physical measures (i.e. sticky bands, removal) and indigenous to N. America. Gypsy moth (now renamed Spongy moth) is a non-web making, non-native pest that may infest some fruit trees species and I have had what may have been caterpillars of that type a few times in my orchard. I was able to control them by removing and destroying them from younger, establishing trees and following up a few times in my small orchard.

An interesting side note is, with the ongoing explosion of emerging cicadas in the midwest and southeast regions, significant ripple effects are expected within forest ecosystems. They include an increase in caterpillar populations due to birds and other bug eaters gorging themselves on cicadas. Cicadas are also one of those species that cause slits on your fruit tree branches where they lay their eggs though this is usually something that doesn’t hurt your trees too much.

Pommes de Terre Acres
Western Intermountain Region

[Steve Dagger]

I have a large desk calendar on which I keep notes as needed then each winter transfer selected data/info to a spreadsheet set-up similar to what Josh describes. It isn’t too hard to customize rows and columns into useful categories by year if you don’t want a lot of detail. Of course, the more specific and comprehensive you get on what you are tracking the more time consuming it is to both set up and do data entry.

The old way of just keeping a file of the desk calendars or journals to reference back to works fine too to bring back important details and recollections of past successes and failures.

Pommes de Terre Acres
Intermountain Regiion (Zone 4a/5b-ish)

[Steve Dagger]

With regard to Josh’s thinking that, “in general, any caterpillar on a fruit tree is a pest” it might be useful to think of the situation in a more nuanced way. I tend to agree with the statement, especially with regard to the potential defoliation of younger trees, but there are various benefits from a holistic management standpoint to having organisms that are a pest at some stage in their life cycle present. For example, they are a food source for birds or they may later become a pollinator.

That said, there are established tent caterpillar populations in the native vegetation surrounding my farm and I, like Josh and Craig, take the preventative precaution of removing caterpillar webs from my fruit trees.