moving apple trees - or not

 A nice orchard with about 40 apple trees is about to be destroyed, along
with the farmhouse, in order to build a giant warehouse a mile or so from
us. The (ex-)owner has said we can gather the apples, which we are doing for
our local cider-making project.

BUT - is there any way of saving these trees, short of taking cuttings from
them to graft?  Someone proposed digging them up and moving them to another
site, but they're probably too old.

Any opinion welcomed on what to do now.  It's all so sad.

someone

 someone wrote:

Yes, apple trees seem to be very forgiving. In a garden of a friend a
mature apple tree - a favourite one - was blown over in a gale. She
asked me to cut it up, but I suggested leaving it as it was, as it had a
small amount of root not severed.

We piled soil up against some of the remaining root, and AFAIK it's
still fruiting well, and the apples are *SO* much easier to pick...

So, if you can get the trees out without damaging the roots too much, my
bet is that most, if not all of them will survive transplanting.

--
Rusty

 
someone;902391 Wrote:

Why do you want to save them?  All sorts of reasons not to do this:
1- If I had a spot to plant (another) apple tree, I'd want to choose
carefully what variety I wanted, what rootstock it was on, etc, not
accept some tree that just happens to be available.
2- Moving a mature tree is likely to be expensive, requiring machinery
or huge amounts of back-breaking work, probably a lot cheaper and easier
to buy something bare-rooted or container grown from a nursery (and
probably the tree will be set back so waiting for a nursery tree to
establish won't be much slower)
3- Apple trees wear out eventually, are these young enough to be worth
the bother of moving
So unless you have cheap access to machinery enabling you to move them
easily, and either this is some very special variety, or you have people
with space who would want these trees regardless of what they are, I'm
not sure that attempting to move them is worthwhile, sad as that may be.




--
echinosum

 echinosum wrote:

Quite. Many of these trees are likely to be of varieties which are *NOT*
available - or of unknown variety.


Yes expensive. Yes, effort. But if carefully replanted, there should be
a crop on the following year.


The original Bramley's seedling is still going strong, and AFAIK, cropping.

As they say across the pond - go figure.

--
Rusty