American Crabapple

Size, growth and what to expect

American crabapple grows slowly, about a foot a year in youth by our growth estimator's model. It makes a short-trunked tree 15 to 30 feet tall and about as wide, with a broad, spreading head and thorny branches. Fragrant white to pink blossoms an inch to an inch and three quarters across open in May.

The hard, waxy, yellow-green fruit runs three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half across, ripens from August into October, and tastes sour. Apples as a group give a good crop every 2 to 4 years. Birds, raccoons, rabbits, opossums, squirrels and foxes eat the fruit, and crabapple thickets give nesting birds shelter. It is also known as sweet crab.

It grows wild from central New York and southern Wisconsin south to Delaware, the North Carolina uplands, Georgia, Tennessee and northeastern Arkansas, along stream banks and woodland edges.

How to grow American Crabapple

American crabapple needs full sun and an ordinary soil that drains. It grows a spreading, thorny crown, so give it 20 feet from other trees and keep it away from walkways.

Set out dormant bare-root saplings from late fall to early spring. Dig a hole twice the width of the roots, no deeper, so that the root flare sits right at grade. Backfill with the soil you removed, water it in, and mulch a ring three feet across, pulled back from the trunk. Sow crabapple seed in the fall half an inch deep in a screened bed, since it needs winter cold to sprout and mice clean out an open bed.

Water weekly through the first summer and in dry spells for two more years. Voles and rabbits strip apple bark, and deer rub and browse young trees, so use a hardware cloth cylinder from the start and leave it on for three or four years.

Sweet crabapple is very susceptible to cedar-apple rust, so plant it well away from eastern red cedar. Seedlings bloom and bear after several years, and fruit set improves with a second crabapple or apple nearby.