OMG Appled Alive! 
I love those!
I giggled as I wrote that last night, sometimes we have to laugh. This morning I noticed weāve entered a new stage wherein they land on top of the wire chicken fence and impale themselves into place, making a decorative rotting apple border along the top of the pen. I watched my husband raking yesterday while apples fell all around him and just shook my head.
Weāll definitely be upping our apple tree trimming game next time!
@OnAMission can you take a picture? Your tree sounds so lovely. Growing up in Florida apple trees are such a foreign concept. Our fruit trees are all citrus and donāt really grow that tall. Do apple trees get fragrant blossoms like orange trees do?
They do get pretty blossoms but they arenāt very fragrant. Iām always jealous of my aunt, she lives in California and has a lemon tree that makes 1000s of lovely lemons every year. She doesnāt even have to do anything to it.
Citrus is amazing. I have a small Meyer lemon tree that produces oodles of lemons yearly and I donāt do anything. Iām surrounded by hundreds of acres of groves on the way to the barn ā¦ when the trees are in full blossom I roll down my windows and breathe in ā¦ itās down right intoxicatingly sweet.
my mother -i-law has a couple of lemon trees in containers. She got a couple of cheap dollies from the Tractor Supply she keeps them on, and she rolls them into the garage when it gets cold.
Lemons are one citrus tree where a small potted plant can supply you with the familyās yearly supply easily enough.
And yes OMG the flowers, so yummie!
Incidentally she grew them from seeds
It only took 10 years for them to mature! 
Iām not an expert, but worked on apple tree pathogens for half a decade or so, and picked up some experience.
Do you know that these are apple trees of an edible variety? Many apple trees in folksā yards are not bred to bear tasty fruit. Those these apples can still sometimes be used in cider. One thing you can do is look for a graft scar towards the base of the tree. It sounds as though itās not on a dwarfing rootstock!
By this time of the year there should be some obvious apples. If they werenāt mechanically or chemically thinned, lots and lots of them. You donāt want a tree to produce too many apples per year; itās a major nutrient sink for the tree.
As other s have said, youāll definitely want to trim it in the dormant season. Iām not sure where youāre located, but if itās a decent edible variety, there will be several diseases and pests with which to familiarize yourself. This is less of an issue in dry areas. But this is another good reason for dormant season pruning.
Apples do need to cross pollinate and cannot self-fertilize in most cases. The original planter likely accounted for this and planted varieties from different varieties that bloom around the same time. Or there may be crab apples nearby.
Hopefully an arborist can help!
Some of the trees do have apples on them but most of the apples are misshapen, I think probably from disease or pests. But these trees have been neglected for a long time in an area where if you neglect apple trees they do really poorly due to pests.
Right now the bottom of a bunch of the trees donāt have leaves. I think itās from tent caterpillars as there are plenty of shoots coming out trying to make a comeback. We had a double whammy of drought and cicadas this year too, and the cicadas really hurt a lot of trees around here.
As for cross pollination, I actually have two dwarf apple trees in pots. They are two different varieties and always bloom and make apples so Iām sure they shared their pollen this year with those trees too.
Crabapple trees can pollinate with apple trees? I was wondering why my tree actually had apples. Can they pollinate with pear trees too? I only have one pear tree but it usually has pears. Last year it had nada.
as I recall they can pollinate with apples, but not with pears. Same family, but not same species, you need a pear for that
Ask an orchard specialist, there are some varieties that are more universal pollinators than others
same goes for pears
Yup, they sure can pollinate apples! In PA, some commercial farmers keep them around for just that reason. Unfortunately, they donāt work for pears.
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