Nice photo Kendra. Your 1st picture looks like the beginnings of South West injury. To stop this from getting worse paint your tree with a flat white interior latex paint in a 50/50 water to paint ratio. Heres a link if you have any questions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qJtVd2k_lI With so many trees I would go to a big box store. Tell them what you are doing. Ask them to put a half gallon of interior white flat latex paint in a one gallon bucket. When you get home fill it the rest of the way with water and shake it up and you are ready to go. Most of your trees look like someone had tried to prune them into a Delayed Open Center form which is fine. However the work on some of them was never completed or they were left to do their own thing and the trees have been neglected for along time. There certainly is a lot of pruning that needs to be done. There is also more than one way to go about it depending on what form you ultimately want the trees to take. Here is a link that may be helpful but is not directed at older neglected trees. It will however give you some ideas that may be helpful and has good descriptions of each tree form. http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/ag29.html I see lots of advice and people trying to tell you what you should do. I dont think we are that point yet. There are at least three basic tree forms you should be considering. Each with its own advantages and disadvantages. They all have their merits and only you can decide which one is right for you and your family. A few things to keep in mind.. You do not have to prune them all the same form. Even if you decide to train them all to the same form you do not need to do them all at once. Apples are usually trained to one of three forms. They are "Central Leader" "Open Center" and sometimes "Delayed Open Center" You should read the descriptions from the link I provided above as I will not be describing them in any detail here. Instead I will give my personal take on what I think are important to the home orchardist and your trees in particular. Central Leader Trees trained to this form are tall Christmas tree shaped trees. They have good fruit production. The disadvantage is that they are tall which makes spraying, picking and pruning harder as you will need ladders and long reach pickers. The trees that look like they were left to their own designs from the start may be a good candidate for this form. Not that you cannot train these trees to either of the other two forms but this may be the easiest and quickest form to achieve with these trees. To do this you would start by cutting any dead or diseased wood then move on the crossing branches that rub. After this cut any branches with bad crotch angles then cut any wood that is growing toward the center of the tree. The next step would be to thin out the branches to let in light and air. You dont want to have scaffold branches all attached at the same pint on the trunk. If you can have them spaced vertically on the trunk 6" or more apart and branching off in different directions. Open Center/Vase Trees trained to this form have less production than the other two forms. However this form has other advantages. They are much shorter which makes them easy to prune, easy to pick and easy to spray and easy to inspect for diseases and infestations. I see none of your trees pruned to this form. If you were going to change to this form you would have to severely top your trees and you would not get any fruit the first season. With trees the size you have there would be some debate whether you should top them in one radical cut or over two seasons. If you chose this form and the trees are still dormant I think I would go with the more radical approach on the smaller trees. On the larger trees I would cut off all the small twigs and cut the current scaffold branches back severely to like 2-3 out from the trunk. The following year I would cut the trunk at 24"-30" from the ground. If it were me I would do this with the smaller trees in one cut while still dormant. If you chose to do that there is nothing wrong with doing only 1-5 trees the 1st year. That way you can see the results and how the trees respond and learn the pruning steps and how they shape the trees before doing more of them in proceeding years. Delayed Open Center The majority of your trees are trained to this form and you may wish to keep this form. If it were me I would keep this form on all the larger trees that are currently in this form. They still need a lot of pruning though. Start by cutting all the dead wood then move on to cutting the crossing branches that are rubbing against other branches or that may rub when it gets windy. Always preferring the larger healthier branches so long as they are not 50% or larger than 50% of the trunks diameter where they are attached. Then move onto cutting water sprouts and any wood growing toward the center of the tree. After this cut any branches that will shade out other branches preferring the branches that have better crotch angles. Then cut out any small branches or wood that is necessary to allow for good air flow and light penetration and you are done. Remember if you have to cut something because of a bad crotch angle or because its shading out a lower branch or because its diseased it does not mean new branches will not grow to replace them. This is the beauty of pruning. The pruning you do will spur more growth and more branches will grow. Cutting out a bad one will often cause many more to grow and you can then cut off the ones with bad crotch angles or that will rub or shade other branches and keep the best new ones next pruning season. Its all a learning experience and you will get better and faster at it as years go by. Most of the good videos are on Open Center pruning but there are others. If you would like I will post some of the better pruning videos I have found if you think you will have time to view them.

MMMMM Roasted Pepper! Me encanta! BTW nice germination setup

Wow Raza great job! I would not be too worried about those roots. Every other year you can remove the pot and put in fresh soil. At that time, if you are worried about the roots, you could carefully unwind them and then repot the tree. I don't worry about the roots until I notice that the tree is rootbound. As far as your fruit questions go I really don't have any experience with the sugar apple. Normally a tree will drop fruits if it can't support the fruits. Your trees still look small so I wouldn't want to many fruit developing this year. Maybe one fruit per branch? Also you may want to find a way to stake up those linbs so once the fruits mature you don't end up with broken branches. Good job on the pollination! I have a grafted Fino cherimoya and another tree with sabor cherimoya and african pride atemoya grafted to it. I also have flower buds but I know the Fino de Jete is still small so I don't expect any fruit to grow on that one but I am hoping the other tree will hold one of each fruits. What kind of sugar apples are they? Was this your first experience with fertilizing the flowers? As far as the black bugs go, I would try and get a picture so everyone can see what your dealing with but your right about the spiders. I encourage them to spin webs on all my plants and trees. Andrew

According to this website, http://postharvest.tfrec.wsu.edu/pages/J5I3A  you cannot tell from looking at Fuji apples as to whether they are ready for picking or not. It goes on to say, "Fujis grown on weak fruiting wood or late flowering young spurs mature later than fruit borne on older wood. Fruit on young and vigorous trees have the dull muddy appearance while fruit on older trees are usually more attractive." Sorry, not much help for you. I usually pick one off and if it's ripe (seeds are dark brown and the apple tastes good), then I usually pick the rest of the apples. Of course, my apple trees are still young and I only let a couple per tree mature...