Anyone getting good apples?

I'm having a hard time with my apple trees.  Our property has wild apple trees all over the place so I know apple trees grow well here.  It's the ones I have planted that I have issues with.  Some of them have been in for 5 or 6 years and haven't produced yet.  Some of these had little apples already growing on them when I planted them, and haven't produced since.  The ones that have produced a couple apples have produced ones that look terrible.  They are covered in scab, misshapen, and just look awful.  These are in my food forest with lots and lots of other kinds of trees, bushes, support species, pollinator species.  I don't know how anyone is getting edible apples without spraying them, and I'm not willing to do that.  I'm ready to give up on apples entirely at this point.  Anyone have suggestions before I just throw in the towel?

A very basic question:

I can see you are in zone 4b. Are the trees you have purchased appropriate for the chill hours needed and zone?

We cannot grow most apples trees, if we want fruit, where I am due to the low chill hours. We could grow almost any apple tree, but it would look kind of rough in mid summer and would never fruit. Hopefully that makes sense.

Josh Hoffman wrote:Are the trees you have purchased appropriate for the chill hours needed and zone?

Yep, all good in that regard.

Trace, if it weren't for the border, I'd send you a bushel of apples! There were trees planted on my land when we bought it and they've produced every year since, although some years are better than others.

That said, I have read that apple trees are more of a colonizer tree and they don't like a lot of competition. The 2 trees that have the most sun and the least competition (well, concrete competition, but not tree competition as they're between a driveway and a farm road) are doing the best. The tree that is more shaded and has a plum to the south and a cherry to the north and it doesn't produce quite as well, or as consistently.

1. Have you tried bud or branch grafting your known varieties onto the wild apple trees?

2. have you considered planting one with much less competition?

As an example; I have this volunteer apple tree that came up early this year in one of my mulched garden areas where I grow cucumbers and watermelons and some other things.

I have no idea what variety of apple it is. I pruned the leader down above 5 scaffolds in May. It looks great, so I am hopeful, but it is a volunteer. I won't know if it will make fruit for several years because of what I mentioned above.

Me and my friend we've been grafting apple trees this year. We've scowled everywhere to find varieties that give great apples and have taken grafts in winter. The rootgraft is Bittenfelder, an apple variety known for being suited for my soil. We want apple trees that produce apples year round and have taken grafts from a great tasting one that produced apples at Christmas time. Hardly any scabs.
Scabs by the way are full of anti oxidants that help the body keep healthy , au contraire to supermarket perfect apples that lack these essential foods that prevent cancer...
Most garden centers sell seeds and trees that are just stuff that the farmers don't want. The farmer market is much bigger and they need to have the first producing fruits. Just because people pay more for the first fruits of the year. So gardeners have to do with all these early varieties that unprotected will suffer a loss of flowers and that need a lot of chemicals. The garden centers love this situation, because the gardener will wail and cry and run to the shop to buy all sorts of amendments and chemical rubbish to spray about. Garden centers thrive on our utter misery.
So supermarkets give cancer as well as gardencenters, so we should not give them our money to poison the planet, but make our own resistant trees that give health.

Trace, is it just this year or year after year?

I've gotten a disappointingly small harvest after planting apples, this is my third year with apples being produced, but I think there are something like 14 apples on eight trees that ought to be mature enough to produce fruit and another ~80 that are still too small. I had more last year. But the apples that are made, are pretty and yummy, so I think we're seeing different issues.

I have most planted in my food forest, so those are surrounded by all sorts of other plants.  I have 4 that I planted in the yard and mulched heavily with wood chips, so those have no competition at all.  I planted two in areas that my wife has flowers in, so they have some, but minimal competition.

Christopher, the problem is every year with apples I have planted.  My wild apples grow and produce every year.  I may have to try Jay's suggestion and graft some branches from the known varieties onto my wild apple trees and see what happens.

Most current commercial varieties of apple has been bred for crispness and to be shippable, not for disease resistance.
Conventional apple orchards spray a lot of toxic ick to get scab free fruit.  
The wild apples near you probably are survivors of a huge number of seedlings over who knows how many years.

Hers a link to the hogtree farm blog:
https://elizapples.com/?s=Scab

Eliza Greenman started this game as a way to be an orchardist, not spray and preserve heirloom apple tree varieties that are not valued in today's conventional or organic consumer market.

I think that apples—wild ones at least, growing in wild natural soils and not irrigated or sprayed or protected in any way—take much longer than a few years to produce strongly, but when they do mature they really do.

The wild and feral ones that are growing strongly are all around, I’m guessing, ten to twenty years old at least. Some of them are at least a hundred. They have to deal with poor hillside soil, browsing from deer, and all sorts of hardships; in the meantime they grow stronger each passing year, grow deeper soil underneath from leaf litter and fallen apples and manure from nibblers, and then when they are really very strong they start fruiting for real.

I have both good and bad apples from the same tree but on different branches. This tree was a volunteer in the middle of my veggie garden 4 years ago and there were considerable differences in term of output ( harvest) and input (amendment/mulch/fertilizer) across different sections of the garden. My hypothesis is that over time imbalance builds up and certain part of the root system can't aquire the necessary nutrient, hence leading to pest and disease issues. I chose not to interfere with this year's crop (no spray) but focused on putting specific minerals back in the soil for healthy new shoots, as they will be the foundation for next year's harvest.

The pictures below showed two branches from the gala apple tree on the same day: one with all the spur leaves devoured by Japanese beetles, apples on this branch were also wormy and distorted; another one had pest free leaves and big healthy fruit. The fruits and spur leaves reflected the nutritional status of last year's growth. In both cases the shoot leaves were immune to Japanese bettles, as the result of mineral applications. I am expecting next year apples from this tree will be all good.