I am interested in growing apple trees for wildlife, my primary focus is to benefit whitetail deer.
I know there are grafted cultivars that express the desired traits: disease resistance, later ripening, hanging after ripe, dropping late, and good storage qualities.
I know that “wild apple trees” (those propagated from seed) will not be “true to seed” (won’t be identical to the parent tree). Apple trees I have learned are “heterozygous”. They have a wide variety of chromosomal traits.
Since humans are also largely heterozygous, I was wondering if apple trees passed on traits in a similar fashion? For example a husband and wife who were Olympic sprinters are probably likely to produce offspring that are much faster than the average human. While human offspring are not clones of their parents, there are often recognizable inherited traits I have observed. I suppose therefore that two crab apple parent trees are likely to generate seed that if propagated would produce smaller fruit?
My question then is this: Would seeds taken from fruit that grew in an orchard of apple trees that were all selected for disease resistance and later dropping traits, be more likely to exhibit such traits when planted? Would it be possible to produce an “improved strain of wild apple trees” through open pollination of trees with similar desirable traits?
I suspect the answer might be a qualified yes: Open pollinated seed from a grove with similar desirable traits, would have a greater probability (no guarantee) of exhibiting such traits.
If my guess is correct, it might be possible to produce lower cost (no grafting) “improved wild apple tree seedlings” for use as wildlife habitat improvement?
Can anyone enlighten me from an authoritative standpoint? Or point me to an authority who might be able to answer my questions?
Skillcult has a lot of great videos about this topic. Short answer: Yes, it is possible and he has documented doing so for the past several years. Keepers from the UK is also doing something similar.
Yes, they would have a higher chance of acquiring those traits. This is often how people get high quality seed for harder to graft nut species for instance.
Apples however are quite easy to graft, so often people go that route to improve the odds to near 100%.
My guess is because this is for large wildlife plantings and food plots you want to cut down on cost and labor and just plant improved seedlings. The methods you describe above would be a decent plan to get to that in my opinion.
I’ve got close to 100 apple and pear seeds from my orchards in a styro flat buried almost to the top in my garden right now. When spring arrives, I’ll pull it out and grow them out for the season. I plan to plant most of what grows in a number of sites around my 95 acres in fall. They will be for deer, turkeys, and other critters.
Just plant Circassian Apple. Thousands of years of wildlife preferred genetic selection in a highly disease resistant package. It has literally been modified by bears and deer.
For as much as apples don’t come true from seed, there’s a reason why the large University breeding programs employ apples with excellent traits in their breeding (flavor, texture, storage life, etc. for domestic parents and disease resistance for wild introgressions). You won’t get all great results from great parents, but you’ll get more great results than you would from parents which do not express the traits you’re looking for.
If simplifying propagation by avoiding grafting is a goal you might consider just getting some known great wildlife selections and using them to create stool beds where you propagate them on their own roots.
Many Southern Apples have done fine up North. Cooper’s Market; a Georgia seedling/sport of Shockley was sold in the millions annually from Orchards in New York through the New Englands. It gave extra income from Baldwin growers for a few months after the Baldwin crop was picked out.
What’s wrong with Yates? It is a go to no spray across the USA.
Most of NY and New England have mild winter lows compared to central and northern MN.
Yates is rated to zone 5 by many nurseries. 6 by others. Pretty good chance it won’t ripen here either…as is the case with many other late ripening southern apples.
Weeks and weeks of -20 to -28 with occasional dips close to -40 limits what can be grown here successfully for the long term. Even Honeycrisp suffers winter damage in much of MN during real test winters.
Do you have a small deer herd now? If yes, you may succeed. If no – the herd is already large – you are doomed to fail.
Here the deer population is so large that no apple seedling could survive grazing. My 4’ tall purchased trees were routinely ravaged (ultimately killed) until I fenced them.
if you want to establish trees for the benefit of deer, you should plant a relatively few trees but fence them until they are >7’ tall. And wrap the trunks in hardware cloth to protect against rabbits and voles.
Given an existing deer herd, the young tree is like a helpless child. It can’t stand on its own until it is tall, with branches out of the reach of deer standing on their hind legs (i.e., ~6-7’), with bark too tough for rabbits and rodents. You could plant a million unprotected little seedlings someplace like here and none of them would survive.
I’ve got over 80 varieties of apples right now. I imagine some will succumb to winter at some point, but many have proven themselves hardy to -30 and a good number to -38.
Canada, Maine, and Minnesota are where many of my trees originated.
As far as the original topic goes, I’m a fan of local seedling apples and crabs. They’ve proven that they grow, produce, and survive here. Several are also very, very tasty.
We have a fair population of deer in and around our property. I fence my trees until they grow above the deer browse line. I’ve planted hundreds of apple trees and intend to plant hundreds more. I rotate my fencing onto newly planted trees as soon as the older ones graduate above the browse line.
Maybe you could explain your plan in more depth and we could provide better advice. How many trees total are you planning on planting out? Are you planning to plant an additional 100, 500, or a thousand trees? How many acres are you trying to cover?
What diseases are present on your property? Scab, cedar apple rust, fireblight and powdery mildew are major diseases and there are many other “minor” diseases as well. The minor diseases maybe a major problem if you live in an area where they are common.
There are very few apple trees that have disease resistance to all the diseases listed above. Generally, you try to pick trees that are resistant to the diseases common in your area and accept damage from other diseases that will be hopefully minor or you spray the trees.
If you want wide spread disease resistance in a strain of apple trees the best way is selective breeding between two highly disease resistance apples like William’s Pride and Enterprise. That maximizes the chances that each offspring tree will have disease resistance. But you still will have offspring that have poor disease resistance. If you want all the trees to be disease resistant you will need to test each tree in the nursery and cull the trees that don’t have resistance. That’s a fair amount of work. Or you could just accept some trees will have poor resistance.
That’s why people graft trees since you are guaranteed to get the traits you want including disease resistance.