Hello, This past spring i was biting into lots of my favorite apples, Pink Lady, only to discover they had an abundance of sprouting seeds, so i planted a bunch. Four of them have survived till now, and winter is upon us. I lie in Minnesota so it gets rather cold. The trees are all in pots and are 7 months old or so, 10 inches tall or thereabouts. What temperature/conditions should i keep them in over the winter. I could keep them inside but fear they will not get their needed dormancy, outside: but fear they will not like the inevitable below zero temps. Dig a hole in the ground and place them in there? Keep them in our three season porch which is moderately wamer than the outside and protected from the elements. Come next spring i'd like to plant them outdoors. Your advice is greatly appreciated. thanks, b*
I would keep them on your 3 season porch (as long as things don't freeze on your porch!). I wouldn't really worry about their dormancy at this point. Dormancy is only required for apple trees that are old enough to bear fruit. Since they are young with tender roots, you definitely do not want their roots to get freeze damage. Planting them in the ground would probably be ok, but depending on the cold hardiness of the seedlings, you could be taking a chance.
Well, the three season porch will likely freeze at some point, it gets really darn cold round here, so i'll find a suitable locale with cool but not frozen temps for them to winter. Thanks for the advice! --bez p.s. i love the name Jascha. I gave the name to a character in a screenplay i wrote.. Now i'll have to add some sort of fruit tree twist. ;o) - best, bez
I'd do half and half. Don't worry about the dormancy, as here in Southern California Pink Lady is evergreen and does not drop its leaves in fall. In the spring the new leaves push out the old ones and it blossoms and fruits just fine (so much for the dormancy and chilling-hour theory). You've discovered one of Pink Lady's remarkable traits- the pips sprout in the apple. Local schoolkids plant these seeds in cups and sprout their own tree without worrying about stratification. The next year we graft good varieties onto the seedling rootstocks. Alas, without grafting the seedlings produce mostly poor quality apples. Applenut
Bezaleel, know that you can plant apple seed to obtain rootstock, that you can then graft a known variety upon. However, apple trees grown from seed rarely produce quality fruit. It is said the chance of getting an apple tree grown from a seed to produce quality fruit is 1 in 100,000. Almost always seedling apples are quite inferior. - Millet
And yet, if nobody ever did grow apples from seed, we'd never get any new tasty varieties. It's fun to try, if you have the space for fullsized apple trees (25 feet tall and wide)
Jascha, you certainly are correct. Some of the best commercial varieties were brought about by chance seedlings. However, I wanted to warn Bezaleel of the fact that the chances of obtaining a good tasting apple is almost non existent before he/she put years of time and waiting into an apple tree only to find out that the fruit will probably be inferior. The chances are about the same as winning the lottery.
I guess i'll just have to do some live research into this phenomenon. I'm certainly a little puzzled as to why the seed grown apple trees in question wouldn't possess the delicious traits of their 'parents' which would more likely than not be of similar quality.. how far do bees travel? I'm guessing, odds are that the apple tree which produced my scrumptious apple was pollinated by a nearby tree, which in this case is obviously from a commercial orchard of some kind. How much genetic variance can there really be from trees of the same variety? Well anyway, i'm no expert, but we'll see what happens. A friend of mine is starting an orchard on his land, with known varieties, so my trees can just grow up and do what they do alongside a more reliable orchard, and viola, the best of both worlds. cheers, bez
How much genetic variance could there be? A lot. Apples are just like people. There will only be one Tiger Woods- he'e one in a billion. If he and his Swedish wife have kids, they will look different than either parent and there's no guarantee that they will be good golfers. Even if they had 100 kids, none of them would look (and play golf) exactly like Tiger. The only way to get an exact copy of Tiger Woods is to CLONE him. This is what grafting is- a way to clone a good apple variety. Planting an apple seed and expecting something good is like playing SuperLotto. You probably won't win. On the other hand, somebody wins SuperLotto every week, and there's no reason it couldn't be you, as you have just as good a chance as anyone else, even if they buy 50 tickets.
Right. But the lottery analogy falls short. Tiger woods children -will- have traits that both parents possess, a combination thereof, and genes not visibly expressed by either parent will come to bear in the child, but it's not as though you're going to get one of danny devito's children from a pairing involving woods and his wife. True, they won't be carbon copies, but children do resemble their parents. There is a natural expression, a natural order, if you will, in genetic expression. Fruit trees must be vastly more simple, genetically, than humans. The lottery is an exercise in near random chance. Genetics is a code. We clone because we want to hold on to certain characteristics, but cloning is also a dead end street, or at least an infinite corridor, perhaps even an ever narrowing corridor due to the problems which inevitably seem to creep into cloned plants. Since i've written as much already, i may as well come out and just say that i think humans are really weird for their insistence upon control. It is largely market driven i suppose. Indigenous the world over knew they could trust that mother nature would provide, but we are obviously on a different path. Anyway, i know there can be variation, and i'm fine with that, i think it healthy, but i suspect that apples from these trees won't be awful tasting. Like i said, i'll conduct the experiment. And if people want to watch the progress, i'll make a web page for my apple trees, and we can all see the fruit they bear. There are four of them, all from Organically cultivated Pink Lady apples. It's going to take a while, but i'm also beginning to cultivate American Ginseng, and they take as many years to yield. Any other thoughts out there? this is an amusing thread from such a simple question. :o) --bez
Oh yeah, one other problem with growing seedling apple trees. It can take 7 to 10 years for them to fruit. You can speed this up by taking a cutting from them and grafting it onto a dwarfing rootstock like Bud-9. But you can usually tell early on even before they fruit if they will be any good or not. Poor quality trees will have dark green, smooth leaves and a lot of short spiny branches. Good quality trees have a certain "fuzziness" to the paler-green leaves and longer branches spaces well apart on the trunk. Your new apples may look quite a bit like Pink Lady, but not taste as good. University breeding programs plant 30,000 seedlings at a time, and will go through the results and determine none of the proginy are better than the parents they started with. Imagine having to bite into thousands of bad apples!... By the way, your "wild" apples will still make tolerable "hard" cider. Applenut
When we moved on to our farm (14 years ago), there was a tiny apple tree growing in the flower bed. I left it there and every year it grew a bit taller and then eventually had apples. They tasted awful! One of the neighbors mentioned he used cherry and applewood for wood working projects, so I left the apple tree to get larger and more useful. This fall it had a bumper crop and they ripened sequentially in Sept. and well past the first frost and are hands down the best tasting apples we have. Keep well too! Am going to graft it onto some other trees so it won't be as vulnerable to loss. I'll even have to prune it this year now that I'm keeping it! Suzy
That is an interesting story Suzy tells. Shows that you cannot judge a young tree's worth by its first fruits. I think it is very worthwhile to try growing from seed. Chance of the next big commercially successful apple is a long-shot, but growing one that is useful to you is not unreasonable to expect. One thing you know, if it makes it to fruiting-maturity, is that it is adapted to local conditions, like soil, climate, pests, etc. As noted, it could at least be used for cider, or as a standard rootstock to graft onto.
I've planted Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Braeburn, Pacific Rose, Fuji, etc. from cold storage apples in Jan-Feb and had them grow up to two feet by that fall. I put mine out in the spring and just let them be in the fall. Mine have all made it thru the winters here in cold, sometimes snowless Zone 3, but they do die back quite a bit which isn't a huge surprise considering the much warmer zones that these apples originate from. Suzy: I loved your story and its good to know that first fruits are not necessarily representative of the tree's true potential. I think a lot of people get caught up in the "official" statistics of 1 apple in 10,000 seedlings being commercially viable. My in-laws found an apple tree growing in an old compost pile of their's and they currently have "Rojen" going thru the selection process in B.C. Their apple is a nice apple, tasty, stores well, but I'd bet money on it never being "commercially viable". And I'd also bet that the seed comes from a Golden Delicious core they threw in the compost. I hear way too many stories like this (and have experienced "wild" apples growing in the ditches) to believe that only 1 apple in 10,000 seedlings is better than compost/animal feed, maybe only 1 in 10,000 is a Honeycrisp, but don't let that deter you from experimenting with apple seedlings. I was recently sent a very cool picture of the fruit from 100 seedling apples from the same parents and I'll see if I can post it here. From what I can see, I estimate that about 20% are going to produce crabs/compost apples, about 50% will produce average apples and about 30% will produce big, nice looking, useful sized apples. 'Course we don't get to see what the parents looked like, but I'm still okay with those odds in apple experimentation: they are much better than a lottery!
Okay, here is the picture. I apologize for the quality, but you get the idea. I'm guessing that the paper in the picture is a standard 8 1/2" by 11" sheet. The wording on the paper is mostly unreadable ( the information I quoted before was what I was sent with the picture), but it is titled: Apple Breeding. There are actually 103 apples in the picture and of those I figure about 42 (the top three rows) would make me very happy, 36 apples (the next 2-3 rows) would be fine for school lunches and the last 25 (bottom two rows) would end up as juice and the trees would get top-worked with something else. I should also add that my in-laws love their Rojen (Ross and Jennie!) apples because they keep light years better than everything else they grow on their small farm in the Kootenays. The Rojen apples are also easy to raise organically, very uniform in size and colour coming straight off the tree without requiring a lot of work put into culling. They also don't have the bumps that distinguish the Delicious apple pair from most other apples.
one thing about genetics of some plants is that sometimes the progeny will not have any characteristics of either of the parent plants they can draw genetics from the long line of genetics that are in it meaning it might cross characters from one sides 10 generations ago and on the other line the 2 generation so the genetic diversity can be kinda crazy in some plants. there are some plants that come "true to seed" and even those do have variance. noone is trying to persaude you not to grow them out they are just pointing out the facts if you are banking on this being the next best apple out there the chances are very tiny of getting something way better than the variety they came from. they may be better as good, good, ok or just not worth the time it takes to grow them out to frutiing size. its not neccesarily control that all are looking for its more in knowing what you want if i find a fruit i like allot and can get a piece of the budwood and know what quality of fruit i will get than to allot of people that makes more sense than planting seeds from it waiting 7 to 10 years or sometimes way longer getting this huge tree and than the fruit ends up being nowhere near as good as the fruit you ate or way worse. i too have seeds from different fruits planted to see what they will become some of us like the chance of getting something new. even with some of those fruits i have grafted plants that i know i like the fruit so that way i am at least getting to eat a fruit i like waiting on the seedlings to bear so i can see if it worth keeping. if i had the property i would probably have fields of seedlings from different types of fruit planted but i would not get rid off all the grafted ones i have that i know are good. either way good luck with the seedlings
I totally agree! I have 160 acres of which I'm still just playing with my kids on about 25 and renting the rest. I have maybe 500 grafted trees, but I also have about 5000 tree seedlings (apples, pears, plums, apricots, peaches, cherries) as well as seedlings of Goji berries, Honeyberries and Blueberries which I am playing around with. My plan is to top graft a lot of them allowing for a for sure crop while still being able to see what the genetics fairy has gifted me with. If I still lived in town with room for one tree, you can bet that it would be a grafted sure bet! My point is simply that people with the interest, time, and space shouldn't be discouraged about growing seedlings. But I also think that they shouldn't bet their retirement on finding the next super seedling variety! Kind of like my commercial warm climate seedlings, they were for fun with my kids and are not even counted in the above numbers of seedling varieties I'm researching.
My cows and sheep will eat any 'failure apples' I produce! I loved the picture of the variety of apples, pipestone. I feel sorry for people who only can eat what they buy at the grocery store... Suzy
