Hello everyone! This is my first posting to UBC Botanicals. I'm looking for help with my apple seedling. It first sprouted out of the soil late April and grew till about 4 inchs, but then stopped growing up. All the leaves fell off recently, but I still have hope that it's alive but needs something I don't know what. I do fear I've been watering it too much, and haven't given it any fertilizer. It's potted in foot deep on soil, so it has plenty of room to grem roots right now. I live in California, where it's sunny about 350 days out of the year, so it's getting enough sun... Any advice on how to help it grow anyone? Thanks!
Dormant perhaps? It's a temperate tree so a period of dormancy is not unexpected. If it experiences enough 'chilling' hours in your climate, it should break bud again in spring.
Yes: apple trees are deciduous. All the leaves die and drop every year, in autumn. Cause for alarm would be if it doesn't leaf back out again when other apple trees in the vicinity have all sprouted, whenever spring for them is down there. Another point about growing apples in LA is you must have locally adapted cultivars to get good results (as elsewhere).
4" of growth since April is lousy growth for an apple seedling here- it should have been around 5' tall and 1/2" thick at the base. It may be just a root sucker from another tree. If you want to start a seedling next spring, check Pink Lady apples as the seeds often sprout within the apple. Put these in a cup of plain dirt until they have 6 leaves, then transplant to a pot (not the ground, unless you intend for it to stay there!). By the way, most seedling apple varieties are horrible but they make vigorous rootstocks. There are dozens of varieties that do very well in LA; do a Google search for "growing apples in a warm climate" to find them.
Applenut is certainly correct. Almost no one ever plants the seeds from an apple, due to the fact that they almost always grow up to produce trees with very inferior fruit. It is said, that the chance of getting good quality fruit from an apple tree that was started from seed is 1 in 100,000. - Millet
I can't see the reason people are discouraging others from experimenting with seedlings, unless they've had personal experience growing several seedlings that turned out to be worthless?! (No slight intended, just that I've seen similar replies in many threads; see interpretation below.) A couple years ago I discovered several trees, which originally were grafted crabapples, but were being overtaken by their rootstocks. These were fruiting and obviously seedlings by the divergency of the fruits' appearances. On average these were mediocre fruit: a couple sweet, dark red ones with cracking problems (like sweet cherries often have,) perhaps overripe by the time I found them; a couple that were fairly small, but sweet and crisp, rather like a miniature 'Gala'; one that was yellow, decent size, and of very good quality, not unlike 'Mutsu'. It is hard to reconcile this discovery (among 5 random seedlings) with a prediction that 1 in 100,000 apple seedlings with produce good quality fruit. That is more like what a state-funded breeding program, like Cornell University or HortResearch New Zealand, would expect; for every 100,000 seedling trees scrutinized, one new apple variety is released. As for the particular seedling regarded in this post, I do wonder whether it was overwatered; and if it was in ordinary potting media, there could also have been a lack of nutrients if never fertilized. I've found that I can let my potted apple seedlings get fairly dry between waterings. A mix of potting media with about 10% coarse sand works well, along with a tall, narrow pot for good drainage and space for root extension downward. I watered with a very weak fertilizer solution and planted 10"-16" tall seedlings in autumn, after about 6 months in a pot.
Yes: it's interesting that it's thought nearly all seedlings will produce inferior fruit. The apple tree is highly variable and surely a great many excellent cultivars have arisen as seedlings rather than branch sports. Pippins (spontaneous seedlings) with large fruits are frequent along roads near orchards. Maybe there is a dominating tendency for these to have poor flavor that I am not aware of.
First, apple seeds require 'stratification' - a period of cool winter waiting (in refrigerator 40F for 3 to 4 months - what would happen if a deer ate the apple, it is deposited on the ground and waits under the snow all winter) - before they are ready for germination. Second, they simply do not reproduce true to seed. You may get an edible apple of no particular variety. Nursery trees are plant twigs grafted onto good rootstock. I've a few years of growing apple trees from seed, an interesting hobby.
