Why Does My Crabapple Have No Flowers?

Do you have a young crabapple tree?

Do you have a very old crabapple tree?

Does your crabapple tree receives a lot of sunlight?

Have your crabapple tree gone through a very harsh, or a very mild winter?

Was the previous summer too dry?

Have your tree been heavily pruned?

Does your crabapple grows on a poor soil?

Does your crabapple tree shows any signs of sickness?

Most fruit trees need several years after planting before their first blooming. Usually it takes 3 or 4 years for crabapples to start flowering, sometimes if the conditions are harsh it can take up to 10 years.

If you have an old tree it may have past its best blooming years.

Crabapple trees require full sunlight and a too shady location may be the culprit when a crabapple isn’t flowering. Although crabapples don’t require heavy pruning, proper pruning in spring can ensure sunlight reaches all parts of the tree.

Crabapple trees require a chilling period, so an unseasonably warm winter may create flowering crabapple problems. At the opposite extreme, prolonged winter temperatures much below -40 °F can kill flower buds and even leaf buds on some crabapples.

A dry summer can lead the tree to take a year off blooming to recover from the trauma. If possible, always water your crabapple deeply during drought.

Crabapples require little pruning, only enough to remove branches that are dead, damaged, diseased, or rub together. Careful pruning, usually at the end of winter, has little to no impact on flowering, but severe pruning, such as cutting back most branches to rejuvenate an aging crabapple, often end up eliminating the buds that had overwintered on the tree.

Crabapples are quite adaptable, but won’t do well in extremely acid or alkaline soil, where drainage is poor or in zones of constant dryness. To counteract poor soil, another possible problem, apply an all-purpose fertilizer in the spring.

Apple scab is a common fungal disease that affects leaves when they emerge in spring, particularly when conditions are moist. Replace the tree with a disease-resistant cultivar, or try treating the affected tree with a fungicide at leaf emergence, followed by treatments two and four weeks later.

It is quite normal for some cultivars to flower and fruit only once every two years. Or to bloom lightly one year and abundantly the next. This kind of biennial flowering is called “alternate bearing” and it’s largely genetic, a holdover from wild apple trees, most of which bloom biennially. When buying a crabapple tree, try to look for an annual bloomer.