Apple: fruit splitting or cracking

What it is likely to be on apple

1. Fruit splitting

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Fruit — splitting and cracking
   • WSU Extension — Washington State University: Apple — fruit cracking disorders

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Fruit splitting open on the plant, usually after rain following a dry spell. Nothing is attacking it: the inside has taken up water faster than the skin can grow, and the skin gives way. The split then lets brown rot in, which is where the real loss comes from.

   Points towards it

   • · heavy rain onto ground that had dried out drives a surge of growth the skin cannot follow
   • · the swing from dry to wet is a weather event
   • · rain reaches every fruit on the tree at once

   Argues against it

   • · clean growth cracks come with no spotting; scabby olive blotches around the crack point at scab instead

   Check this next

   Look at the edges of the crack and at the skin around it. A growth split on a pome fruit is clean and deep, running down from the eye or across the shoulder, with sound firm pale flesh on both sides and no marking on the rest of the skin — and it follows a dry spell that broke in heavy rain. A quince or pear that cracks with corky brown scabby patches around the split has scab rather than a water problem, and one that has gone soft and brown with buff pustules has brown rot.

   What to do now

   Pick and use the split fruit promptly, because a crack is an open door for rot and for wasps and the fruit will not store. Nothing sprayed on the tree prevents this. What does help next season is keeping soil moisture even rather than extreme: a thick mulch over damp ground in spring holds far more water in reserve than heavy watering once the cracks have appeared, which is too late to matter.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Fruit — splitting

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Apple and pear scab

   Candidate 2common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Apple and pear scab
   • University of Minnesota Extension — University of Minnesota: Apple scab

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Olive-brown blotches on leaves followed by corky black scabs on the fruit. It looks alarming and is mostly cosmetic on the fruit; the real cost is repeated early leaf fall, which weakens the tree over years.

   Points towards it

   • · the split runs through a defined corky black-brown scab patch rather than through clean skin
   • · spores from fallen leaves reach the whole tree in a wet spring
   • · infection needs prolonged leaf wetness in spring

   Argues against it

   • · fungal growth standing proud of the surface in buff rings is brown rot rotting the fruit, not the flat corky scarring scab leaves
   • · scab is a wet-spring orchard disease and does not establish indoors — this rules it out entirely.

   Check this next

   Look at the leaves before looking at the fruit. Scab shows on leaves from late spring as olive-green to brown blotches with soft indistinct edges, often followed by early leaf fall, and only then on the fruit as black corky scabs that crack as the fruit swells. A tree whose leaves were clean all summer did not produce scabbed fruit. The cracks themselves are shallow, brown-lined and centred on a scab patch, unlike the clean deep splits through sound skin that water causes.

   What to do now

   The fruit is still edible — peel or cut out the scabbed parts — and it will not store, so use it first. The one control that genuinely works in a garden is clearing and removing fallen leaves in autumn, because the fungus overwinters on them and reinfects from the ground in spring; raking them up or mowing them into shreds cuts next year's infection substantially. Pruning to open the centre of the tree so leaves dry faster helps as well. Do not spray a garden tree for this — it is largely cosmetic on the fruit.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Apple and pear scab — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

3. Brown rot

   Candidate 3common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Brown rot
   • Home and Garden Information Center — Clemson Cooperative Extension: Peach diseases — brown rot

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Fruit turning brown and soft with concentric rings of buff pustules, often while still hanging. Affected fruit shrivels into a hard 'mummy' that stays on the tree over winter and infects next year's crop from where it hangs.

   Points towards it

   • · buff-grey pustules form in concentric rings on the rotting surface, which no water split and no scab produces
   • · it moves between fruit that are touching, so it appears in clusters rather than scattered through the tree
   • · warm damp weather through ripening is what lets it spread

   Argues against it

   • · damage appearing evenly across the whole tree in one night is weather rather than a fungus spreading by contact

   Check this next

   Look at what the affected fruit is touching, and look for last year's fruit still hanging. Brown rot spreads by contact, so it turns up in clusters with a shrivelled blackened mummy at the centre, and the rot is soft and brown with rings of buff pustules standing proud of the skin. A weather split is scattered wherever fruit happened to ripen first, and the flesh at the edge of the crack stays firm and pale. Wounds from wasps, birds and scab cracks are how it gets in, so the two often appear together on the same fruit.

   What to do now

   Remove every rotting fruit and — more importantly — every shrivelled mummy still hanging on the tree through winter, and put them in the bin rather than the compost heap. Those mummies are where the fungus overwinters and clearing them does more than anything else available to a home grower. Thin the crop so fruit does not touch, and handle ripening fruit gently, since almost every infection starts at a wound.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Brown rot — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on apple — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general fruit splitting or cracking page lists causes across all plants, and the Apple profile lists the problems it is prone to.