Cousinfloyd. Same here. I was at or local HD yesterday and the blueberry plants looked great but they had some Rabiteyes and some northern highbush. Why they add the northern highbush is a mystery to me. Another issue is with pears. Almost all stores around here offer the bartlett pear which normally dies soon after it starts blooming from fireblight. Bill
Interesting, I have never heard of a twisted Apple tree. I will have to look out for that type. Learn something new all they time here.
I wonder if that is suppose to be 2 dwarfs twisted together for freestanding support. Iâm not sure I would like the bark rubbing since some apples are prone to fungal infection. Eventually they would fuse together as they grow larger.
Last autumn I was at Home Depot and saw fruit trees on clearance. I was curious, so I walk over to take a look. I expected to see boring, standard varieties like red and yellow delicious apple. I was shocked that there was a satsuma plum for $20. Plums and peaches are very rare in my area. To have good variety is very shocking. Of course, it could be mislabeled or have inferior peach roots. Moreover, an ignorant buyer might later wonder why the thing never sets fruit considering the very low probability of pollenizers in the area.
The reason the box stores have Northern highbush is one guy buys for the whole chain. It works for me, as northerns grow fantastic here, being in the great white north! Well almost, Michigan.
I remember my cousin from Maryland (with a strong southern accent) told me I had a Canadian accent. First I had to remind him the all people on TV sound like me, you have the accent, not me. I said to him âHey, how you doing?â I told him, if I were Canadian, I would have said " How you doing? Eh?" Huge difference IMHO,. OK, well Iâm going outside and go make a snowman, laterâŚ
But the other âtwistâ trees are pretty cool, have to say.
Once in a while, I buy the 65% off clearance fruit trees from Lowes or HD and let it grow for a season. I then do mulit-graft the following year from those trees.
Tony
the trees in my yard came from a âreputableâ local nursery. One was mislabeled and all struggled due to being root bound in the pots. It takes time for the tree to get roots growing outward. much better to buy bare root from Raintree and etc.
Just my two cents. I would agree with most of the comments about running a higher risk w/ mislabeling and rootbind. Some people have good luck w/ some local big box stores, but it probably depends on the individual store.
Iâve bought trees from big box stores before and received a high percentage of mislabels. Now, accurate labeling is much more important to me, so I wouldnât consider big box trees.
Also agree the cost of the tree is fairly nominal compared to the cost of the care which goes into it. On top of that, one can salvage the cost of the tree by selling the adult tree for smoking wood. Iâve done this some.
When I need to take out an older peach tree, I sell them on Craigslist for smoking wood. I sell them for 20 bucks per tree and havenât had any trouble moving them. In effect, there is no cost of purchasing the tree, since the salvage value = the purchase price. Nevertheless about 95-98% of the cost is in the growing and care of the tree, not the initial cost of the tree, so it really doesnât matter if the trees are salvaged and sold for smoking wood or not.
All that said, I still do a lot of grafting to save money on the purchase price of trees. I have about 30-40 trees I grafted which I need to move to the orchard this spring. Thatâs about $500 worth of trees, which makes it worth the time to graft them.
Olpea, for what kinds of fruit trees is there demand for smoking wood? I assume apples but anything else?
cousinfloyd,
I am a big smoker(in cooking terms) and all fruit wood is great for smoking. Apple and Cherry are very common, but i have also used grape as well. I am sure peach and plum would be great for pork.
Ron
Cousin,
Iâve sold peach only. But as Ron indicates, the people who buy peach want just about any fruit wood. They ask for apple, and cherry especially.
I donât put much effort into it. I just post an ad on craiglist, something like âPeach Wood For Smokingâ, then go ahead and describe what Iâve got. I donât cut it down until they get here, then get my chainsaw and cut it down while they load it in their pickup. That way itâs fresh and they can dry the wood out as much or little as they want. Sometimes they are interested in purchasing other things you grow as well.
Ron and Olpea, thanks for those details, and thanks Olpea for mentioning the idea in the first place. Thatâs a great little idea.
In the maritime Pacific NW it rains all fall, much of winter - with some freezes / snoww - and all spring. The rainy season stimulates leaf curl fungus, washing the spores into buds where they grow and infest all new growth. Instead of just being an annoyance, PLC here defoliates whole branches, destroys the peach crop, and can kill the entire tree. There are ways around it, but none work for me. I have one now Im trying to keep in a container and I move it to shelter when it rains, and into the sun when not rainy. Which is not easy for an old guy on chemotherapy plus a bad back. There ARE leaf curl resistant peach varieties - Indian Free or cling, I forget which, Oregon Curl Free, Charlotte - mine gets curl - and Q-1-8. Those were not offered at the nursery I mentioned, but they did have Honey Babe and other genetic dwarfs. Itâs interesting, Tri-lite Peach/Plum hybrid gets leaf curl bad too, but non of my plums get it. So instead of giving it the Plumâs resistance, it got the peachâs susceptibility. I wonder if Peacotum would have curl? Or pluerry, which dies contain peach ancestry.
Apricots do fine unless they awaken early in the mild winter then freeze, which kills the non-dormant tree to the roots. Dormsnt trees can take the freeze but not the apricots or Aprium that I bought here, once they are blooming. Iâve had that happen with every apricot Iâve grown. Peaches and some plums can do the same thing, but they survive, just no or less fruit. Iâm now trying a genetic dwarf apricot, which will be in container too. I need to make a wheel-platform for both.
Holly S., I have tons of prime âsmoking woodâ that I let rot every year. Guess I should post on Craigâs list. Do they like smaller wood or only firewood size wood.
Alan,
Most people prefer 1.5" diameter and up. I used to post in the Craigslist that I would cut the wood to any length they wanted till one guy wanted me to cut it into 8" pieces. Now I say I will cut it to any size down to a foot in length.
It doesnât take long to cut a tree up with a sharp chain. I can easily cut one up in 10 or 15 minutes. Another reason I cut the tree up in front of the customer is so that they can take what the want and leave what they donât. Plus they can see they are getting the whole tree.
One guy not only bought the wood, but was so glad to get it, he gave me some of his smoked cheese too. The cheese was so good, the next time I had a good bunch of wood, I traded it out for a bunch of his smoked cheese.
Itâs really a good deal for hobby smokers. These smoke supply places charge like 7 bucks for a little bag of wood chips. Thatâs as much of a rip-off as those convenience stores selling a tiny bundle of firewood for 5 bucks.
Some time ago somebody posted on GW about contacting the grower from a loweâs purchased dwarf or semi-dwarf apple he/she purchased. The person inquired about the type of rootstock the tree was grafted on to. The grower/supplier said they were âon malus domestica seedlingâ rootstock. In other words grown from pips, probably from the sauce/canning industry. So, it could grow the size of a tomato plant or a small apartment building. How on Earth they get the âdwarfingâ aspect is beyond me, maybe they used Northern Spy seedsâŚor maybe they just lied a little bit. I think the latter is more likely.
Iâve also seen walmart trees blown over by the wind in their garden center and the soil had spilled from the pots exposing almost NO roots at all. All this on huge 1 1/2" caliper 6â tall trees.
Many have lots of low blind wood or are poorly shaped.
Having said that though, I have also seen perfectly balanced and nice trees in the BB stores as well.
As others have pointed out they are also bad for stocking some varieties of trees and bushes that simply WILL NOT grow here at all, though in recent years they have gotten much, much better in this regard.
They also use to only sell old varities like Jonathan, Mac, Red Del., Yellow Del. etcâŚnot anymore. They sell much newer and better varieties than ever before.
All stores are NOT equal either. Southern States for example sells very high quality trees of good varieties, but they also cost nearly double what a Walmart, Loweâs, or HD tree costs. They do not however list rootstocks.
I sent the grower an email asking about a apple in particular and they immediately asked for the coding number from the tag. I sent it and in less than 10 minutes they replied itâs âon M106â. My observations confirm it is almost without a doubt M106. It is one of my very best trees and cost I think around $35 4 or 5 years ago. It was perfectly branched and shaped and produced apples the first year it was planted and every year since.
So you can get a very nice tree if you are knowledgeable and avoid some of the pitfalls. I DO love to visit Loweâs garden center this time of yearâŚjust to see what they have and to wonder how they can produce and sell these trees so cheap while still making a profit. Almost unbelievable.
I was in Wally world today and they must have just received the first shipment of spring fruit trees this year. I looked at all of them closely and to their credit they looked like very nice healthy trees with good structure and packaging. Prices were very good too. Now the bad part, the varieties were very boring and typical and none of them indicated the rootstock. They had gold & purple plums, red and yellow delicious apples, and some variety of peach that had the word Georgia in it.
Last year theyes had satsuma plum trees and Southern states had a few better varieties.
Appleseed, that is all extremely well said but being a stickler and a general PIA Iâd like to point out that Northern Spy is a very vigorous grower that is about as late a bearing variety as there is.
Interestingly, it also sports root primordia all along itsâ trunk wood, which is a sign of a variety (apparently) that easily roots from cuttings. Someone who used to post at GW- I think maybe Applenut, spoke of using such cuttings as rootstock for growing apples in tropical Africa.
AlanâŚwhen I spoke of Northern Spy, I was not referring to the variety as a scion, but rather as a rootstock grown from Northern Spy seed. I am sure you are aware, rootstock grown from Northern Spy were widely used in early America for their medium size, uniformity, and I think DR as well.
Donât ask me how there was not the same genetic variability with Northern Spy as with other stock grown from seed, but there apparently is not. Maybe it most often contains a large enough quantity of dominant genes to allow for medium sizingâŚI dunno.
Iâm guessing Northern Spy seedling stock must grow to something maybe a bit larger than M111. I first read about this in a fruit growing guide from I think around the mid 1800âs.
Northern Spy seedling stock is (or was, even recently) still widely used in Australia.
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No, appleseed, I was not aware of that although to me it seems like an interesting piece of folk lore because I canât imagine why their seedlings would be more stable in traits than seedlings from any other variety. I would bet it is another one of those passed on assumptions based on limited anecdotal experience of maybe a highly successful grower or some such source.
Or perhaps it started with the practice of producing new trees from NS cuttings, which would make sense and somehow the information became myth in the retelling.
OK, I admit to being close illiterate when it comes to genetics, but I did read Poulanâs, âBotany of Desireâ, which does a great job of explaining the extreme diversity of pretty much ALL apple seedlings.
Where I could imagine and have heard of apples passing on most of their traits to progeny is with the few self fertile varieties, but this only occurs when they are isolated. Iâve never heard that NS was one of those, but I suppose that is another possible explanation.
Anyway, the scion wood produces a quite vigorous tree.