When were these trees planted? To me, they don't look too bad at all. The leaves are curled but still nice and green. If I had to guess I'd say there's a bit of water stress going on. I'd say your trees' root system aren't able to get enough water to keep the leaves from curling, either because there's not enough water or those roots simply aren't established yet. Likely the latter. Don't overdo the watering. I would suggest some slow, deep watering. If you have a 5-gallon bucket, drill a tiny hole on the side near the bottom, fill the bucket, and set it above where the roots are located. Let it drain overnight, the slower the better. You might also find this a good time to do some summer pruning. Those branches look like they could use some cutting way back. That would reduce the workload on the roots and possibly balance your trees' root systems vs their tops. If they were recently planted, the roots likely are behind in development compared to the tops.

Brandon, thanks for the info on planting. This is new to me, and I just couldn't imagine anything young taking root in the dense soil I had to hack through to dig the hole so amending it seemed to make sense at the time. I can see how it would create an artificial tub now. I guess time will tell if the tree fully takes. I'll try to gauge the soil dampness better. With the sun around here, the surface dries out very quickly. It may well be that I'm not watering enough, though I'm not sure how to judge what's happening down at the bottom of the roots. jqpublic, I'm zone 9 by zip code but San Jose can be in the 8s too. In any case, the apple trees in the neighborhood seem to do very well. (and Ken - don't worry, I'm tickled pink that it set fruit so quickly. I just don't want to kill it!) Thanks for the help, everyone.

More branches have started looking bad, so I snipped one off as well as a leaf that has some reddish coloring on the bottom and stopped by OTooles. They think it is blight. They recommended cutting off all the branch parts that are looking bad, disinfecting the clippers after each cut, and then hope for the best. They said spraying now might not help, and could just be a waste of money. So I gave my little tree a pretty good hair cut, taking off all the obvious bad tips as well as trimmed off the tips of all the other branches as well (partly to make it look more uniform, but also as a precaution in case those has some bit of it as well). I threw out all the branches into a garbage bag and put into the trash can. Any other tips on what I might do if it is indeed blight? From the little bit of googling I did on it sounds like it is pretty common for young apple trees, but there are some varieties that are more resistent to it (of which mine must not be!). If my tree doesn't make it after all, I'll be sure to look for one of those! I just hope it doesn't spread to my Peach and Pear trees. And speaking of my Peach tree, I'm actually wondering if that's where it came from. We bought all 3 trees last summer, and the top of the Peach starting looking bad fairly soon after planting it. But then fall/winter came, and everything went dormant, so didn't think much more about it. I did prune that part of the Peach tree several weeks ago, because it wasn't showing signs of growth. I don't remember trimming on my Apple tree after that, though, so hopefully I didn't actually do the infecting ... but not real sure. Guess it's another one of those "wait and see" situations! Marj

I just don't ever experience hail damage so can neither confirm or deny......although it seems very strange to me that hail damage would appear along the trunk or the underside (or close to it) of any branches. IMO, it looks more like the beginning of apple anthracnose. But I'd suggest taking these photos and any samples you could manage to your county extension office for both an accurate ID as well as suitable treatment options.