Thomis. You have a beautiful orchard. Not a lot of thought went into my first apple varieties and now IâÂÂm going in the same direction as you. I currently have Goldrush, Empire, and Arkansas Black. These are supposed to be FB resistant and as of now IâÂÂve had no problems. I will be grafting other resistant varieties over the one that are prone to this disease provided they are still healthy enough. Some other varieties I have that may not make the cut are, Jonagold, Mollie, Yates, Winter Banana, and Honeycrisp. Good luck with your conversion, Bill

King David, Red Rebel, Reverend Morgan, Wickson Crab, Black Oxford seem to resist it here. But every one of the above and the ones you listed will get it in bad years. FB resistant rootstock will not impart that quality to the scion either.

Thank you Bill and Applenut.

I only have 5 apples in the garden and the most disease resistant is the Arkansas Black - it shows no signs of anything but it also rarely sets fruit. I'm lucky if I get 4 apples off of the entire tree, which is covered in blooms in the Spring. I'm switching it out for another AB as soon as I find one I like.

I get very little disease on my Goldrush and my William's Pride. The Goldrush is only a few years old and the William's Pride also showed no disease for its first few years so time will tell. I get just enough fruit from each of them with the WP being a summer apple and the GR being a fall crop (and my hands down favorite apple flavor of all time).

I have one local heirloom that has yet to fruit but is big enough to next year. I know the person who grafted it and can see that his trees have no fireblight. This has been a bad year for blights here in NC and my little tree didn't catch it but it did show a tiny bit of Cedar Apple Rust which all the junipers within miles of my yard are infected with (there is no way to remove them, they're in the woods that belong to someone else).

I have a 'Horse' heirloom that was disease free for years but caught everything this year - my first year with a spray program. It will be chopped down soon and replaced with an 'Enterprise' or something else, or another GoldRush.

Liberty is touted as being FB free, and I have never experienced any problem with it in over 20 years. But we don't have a great deal of FB on apples around here anyway, although it can be hard on pears.

Not everybody likes Liberty, but we do and are learning how to store it over some months.

Thomis, Your orchard is so perfect! How did you get such an attack of fire blight? I have 'Enterprise' a very disease resistant apple. It is dark red, medium sized, thick skin, but excellent tasting. It is very slow to fruit. 'Pristine' is another disease resistant 'early' yellow apple. Makes the best pie and applesauce.

I guess my spray sched. is working in that my Jonagold has huge apples (for this time of year) on it. No fire blight in sight. Fingers crossed. Mrs. G