Pruning and Plant Health

My conclusions about the yellowing of the leaves is that it was not an iron problem, but there were big changes in temperatures of the week. I believe this caused a hormone imbalance in the trees and turned the leaves to yellow. There was also was looked like apple scab that was attacking the leaves. To combat that I sprayed a copper fungicide which seemed to work.

I do not know if the fertilizer did anything other than it started to produce some sort of fungus which was concerning but as time went on it seemed not to damage the plants at all. 

The time I took this picture is probably the largest and most noticeable it became. Since then it has gone down quite a bit if not completely gone. 
​I also noticed in some of the trees there were some shriveling of the leaves. My guess is that they are too close together and started to grow a fungus or something that is killing the leaves. I also noticed that the root stock shoots tended to have more infection on them than the grafted stocks which was interesting because the root stock is bred to be very hardy and handle against most diseases. My particular root stock is M7 which is a semi dwarfing root stock.

In order to combat this I had to prune back the root stock shoots. The root stock shoots and leaves were crowding the grafted leaves so much I do not think they were able to dry. Taking off all the root stock shoots really opened up the tree and everything seemed a lot more open. I think this will help tremendously after I water the plants. It will allow them to dry and grow more. 

Another cool find is I saw an apple start growing on one of the trees which was really cool. I had to clip it off because it takes a lot of nutrients away from the vegetative growth that I want. The apple could also grow and snap the graft off.