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More than 50 years have passed since the breeder S. I. Isaev bred a new variety of apples in the garden of Moscow University. And after it was zoned in the mid-90s, the Uslada apple tree became widespread throughout the central part of Our Country. The description of the high palatability of the fruit, unpretentiousness in care, frost resistance and high resistance to diseases encourage gardeners to plant this wonderful tree in their backyard.
Variety description
The tree of the Delight variety does not belong to the tall ones, in the adult state it reaches 3 meters, sometimes it grows a little higher. The crown of a young apple tree is round, stretches with age and turns into an oval. Fruiting begins in the 4th or 5th year, increasing with each subsequent year. An adult tree brings up to 80 kg of apples, which are firmly held on the cuttings, so they need to be collected from the tree, and not from under it.
“Delight” is a self-fertile variety, in order to get fruits, you need to plant other varieties nearby for cross-pollination. “President”, “Bogatyr”, “Orlik”, “Grushovka”, “Bolotovskoye” are perfect. Next to such neighbors, “Delight” will bring beautiful yellowish-green fruits with a bright red blush. Their taste is dessert, and the aroma is raspberry – it is impossible to pass by at the bazaar or in the middle of the garden. They begin to feast on them from mid-summer, still green with a distinctly sour taste, and in autumn they are filled with fragrant sweetness, filled with a bright blush. For long-term storage, they are removed slightly unripe.
The tree is not considered too large or spreading, but in the garden it is better to leave 4 or even 5 meters between individual trees.
Advantages and disadvantages
The description of a variety always begins with its advantages. “Delight” perfectly tolerates winter colds, is practically not exposed to diseases, special resistance to scab allows it to be grown in areas with rainy summers. But fallen leaves still need to be removed from the garden, so as not to support the growth of pathogenic bacteria, and not to give shelter to rodents.
Abundant harvests, early fruiting, good keeping quality of fruits, easy easy care allow you to grow apples not only for yourself, but even for commercial purposes.
The description of the shortcomings usually comes down to one thing – in the absence of pruning, the apple tree produces fruits of uneven size. It is easy to deal with this by including competent annual pruning of the tree in the mandatory care, especially since it is not too tall.
Apple trees of this variety are widely grown in the central regions, it is easy to find its description and reviews. Anyone who has planted “Delight” in his dacha will certainly recommend it as a very grateful apple tree that does not require painstaking work or special care.
Planting and care
Planting apple trees can be done in the spring, when the ground has completely thawed, usually this time falls on the end of April, or in the fall – in September or early October, so that the tree has time to take root before the cold weather.
It is better to prepare the pit in a week, or even more – it needs to be dug to a depth of 70 cm, compost (or humus), superphosphate, potash and nitrogen fertilizers are laid, mixed with the ground from the bottom of the pit and left like that, covered from possible precipitation. After 7 or 8 days, the seedling is lowered into the pit and the roots are covered so that they remain straightened, it is better to plant together. Then the tree is watered, a week later abundant watering is repeated again, the ground around the trunk is mulched. It is advisable to drive in a peg and tie a seedling to it for stability for the first time.
“Delight” prefers to grow in black soil, but it is so resistant and unpretentious that it takes root on any soil.
Proper care is regular watering, loosening the soil around the trunk, fertilizing.
With the beginning of autumn, fertilizers must be applied annually, then the harvest will be consistently rich, and the fruits will always be tasty. For each square meter of the trunk circle, at least 5 kg of cow manure or 1 kg of bird droppings are due. If you have your own compost, then you can fertilize it, only it will have to be taken up to 8 kg per 1 sq. m. In the spring, during violent flowering, many gardeners dilute complex mineral fertilizers with water and add their solution to the water for irrigation. Such feed water is not poured from above onto the ground, but is poured into prepared holes 30 cm deep or a small ditch around the trunk.
In early spring, when the tree has not yet woken up, sap flow has not begun, you need to carefully cut it. Pruning aims at destroying tops, thinning the crown sufficiently so that not a single branch covers another from the sun. When the tree ages, pruning will also be rejuvenating. Places of cuts are covered with garden pitch.
Breeders took care of resistance to damage by pests, fungus, bacterial diseases, but many gardeners, not wanting to take risks, still carry out preventive treatment of trees with Bordeaux liquid in early spring, before the buds have yet blossomed.
In winter, apple trees may suffer not from frost, but from hares. To exclude this possibility, tree trunks are covered with spruce branches, film, mesh, or smeared with a mixture of fish oil and naphthalene, this smell can scare away even the most hungry hare.
Fruits of Delight
The fruits of “Delight” are medium in size, they ripen in August – September, usually weigh 100-130 g, sometimes they can reach 170 g if the trees grow on black soil.
Round yellowish-green apples with a red blush, reaching full ripeness, turn red, white dots are visible through a thin (but strong) skin. They have a pleasant dessert taste, sweet with sourness, and raspberry aroma. The high content of pectins, sugars and vitamin C (twice as much as in Antonovka) determines the use of apples of this variety in children’s and dietary nutrition. Moreover, they are good not only fresh, but also after cooking, and they do not lose their benefits even after conservation.
If you harvest a crop slightly unripe, and then store it in a cool room, then you can enjoy these wonderful apples even in mid-January.
The crown of the tree is very overgrown, and this greatly affects the size of the fruit. If you do not engage in annual pruning of branches, then the fruits will be born uneven, many small ones will appear. This is especially bad for gardeners who grow apples for sale. But this is easy to deal with – you just need to limit the growth of the crown, ruthlessly cut the tops and shorten the branches that tend to obscure the neighbors. Then fragrant tasty apples with fine-grained white, and in some places slightly reddish flesh, will be almost the same size.
Video “Planting apple trees of domestic varieties”
This video is about varieties of apple trees, planting seedlings and measures to protect fruit trees from rodents.
