Hello: We've recently moved into a house with an established garden. The neighbours tell us that the original gardener had fruit trees, berries, and worked the garden since the 1920s but that it had been a bit neglected for the last decade. We were delighted to find an apple tree in a place of prominence in the yard. But the apples were awful. Mealy, bitter and small. Further investigation, now that it's lost some leaves, shows what I think is that the "tree" is in fact many branches coming up from the rootstock, and that the original grafted tree only remains as a stump. Any suggestions? Can I graft new stock onto one of the larger branches? Should I just start over with a new tree?
i would say take out all but two of the branches and than graft to two of the larger sprouts if all the sprouts have been producing than it would be able to hold and fruit two diff varieties i live in florida so i donto know a whole bunch about apples but i do have two varieties one is the tropic sweet than i grafted a piece of a friend of mine golden dorset they are both low chill varieties when it does produce apples they are about the size of golf balls but o so good just make sure to keep up with taking the root suckers off regularly. and it might be worth a shot to root some of those root suckers too if you wanted more apples in you're yard than graft to those. if you donot know how to graft than now would be a good time to learn you could actually try to graft all of the suckers than the ones that take pick thru and see wich ones are growing better when they start growing than just cut the rest of them off accept a few of the grafts i typed in grafting apples into youtube and there are some decent videos on grafting apples and several different types of grafts
