Why would the red apples not be counted as a apple? I read there are some good tasting red apples. Namely rose mountain apple and the redlove series. Never tried them myself but people describe them as a lemonade or fruit punch tasting which I would not say is bad. As for apples there are over 7000 varieties so there is going to be a lot of duds.
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How compatible is the apple and quince? Quince as rootstock or apple as rootstock?
I know apple and crabapple do not grow well on pear, stay alive for awhile but grow smaller every year.
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Certain cultivars of pear graft well to quince, others don’t. Comice is best known for grafting well on quince. clarkinks made a great post on this topic here: What pears are quince compatible?
I don’t think apple and quince are very compatible from what I can find. I’m assuming using interstems would work to graft apple to quince though, quince rootstock->pear interstem->winter banana interstem->apple of your choosing
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Fertility pear might be a good interstem to mate to the Winter Banana. I’ve fruited fertility on an apple tree before the grafted portion eventually died. I’ve also fruited Winter Banana apple on a European pear tree.
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What’s unique about winter banana that allows this graft?
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Oh they certainly are! I was just making an example that those apples are accepted as a different species vs those native to North America, as the wiki article I linked suggests.
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And for the example of trying to get as many fruits growing as possible, allowing your “interstem” to grow fruiting branches would be beneficial.
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Quince is a popular dwarf rootstock for Pears.
It’s unique in that it is an apple variety that’s known to be compatible with pears. As to why that is, I would assume it has to do with genetics. Same reason Comice is compatible with quince whereas Bartlett isn’t, different genetic compatibilities. Beyond that I don’t know but would be interested to learn more.
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Thanks for the info!
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I’m not sure how well grafting compatibility is understood, even by academia I certainly couldn’t tell you what makes some more widely compatible than others.
That’s interesting about medlar. I’ve always been curious what it is like, but not curious enough to grow a whole tree of it. Does it need interstem to be grafted on an apple tree? Does anywhere even sell medlar scions? Has anyone ever even tried grafting it to apple?
I just had my medlar trees fruit for the first time this year. They would’ve fruited last year if it wasn’t for the May 9th freeze that ruined all my other fruit trees chances as well. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how good they are. I left them to ripen on the trees and they started getting soft earlier this month. Some are still on the trees. I really like that it’s a fruit that I can just forget about until December, which is well out of the time frame of the summer/fall harvest season when I’m picking everything else (apples, pears, pawpaws, figs, raspberries, persimmons, etc). The fresh fruits have the texture of apple butter but I think they taste more like apple cider. I made a jam with them and it turned out fantastic. They seem to naturally have some warm spice flavors to them that complements the apple-like taste really well.
They graft well to hawthorn and quince. I haven’t tried grafting to pear. I have tried grafting to crabapples and there seems to be some compatibility there. Some of the grafts were weak and ended up breaking after a year or so. A few of the grafts held strong though and were growing really well the last time I checked. I haven’t checked them in a while since I don’t have that property anymore. Delayed incompatibility was my concern. Here’s a post I made about them last year: Anyone growing Medlar? - #39 by TJ_westPA
I bought my trees online from Cricket Hill Garden. Not sure if they sell scions, but I was very happy with my trees from them. I will have scions available in February/March of the 2 varieties I own (Puciu Mol and Breda Giant) if you’d like me to send you some. I’m always interested in trading scionwood and small plants at that time of year so we could do that if you want.
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Thanks for that information, Tony.
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Delayed incompatibility is fickle for example my king apple on mountain ash grew 18in+ of healthy growth year 1 with perfect even graft union next year never leafed out (like tree cut it off) meanwhile Europeans have big ugly unions (they overgrow) yet produce fruit…
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I tried to create some miniature pear trees by grafting onto serviceberry, aronia,and Chinese haw. The ones on seviceberrry and aronia both took but remained too tiny after two years so I threw them away, The one on Chinese haw is thriving, maybe too much for my miniaturizing ambition. Im not sure of the cultivar, the tree was here when I bought the property. I think it looks like Nijisseiki.
I cant remember for certain. I believe at the time I was looking at research reports regarding dwarfing pears on proprietary serviceberry rootstocks. Some cultivars works a lot better than others. I just used cultivars that I could find, so not a scientific test at all. Cottoneaster also works but again which cultivar. If Im not mistaken, Cottoneaster is highly dwarfing but you have to let some of the understock grow too or it wont survive.
I grafted Winter Banana onto an apple tree. Winecrisp, then grafted a Bartlet onto that. It survived a couple of years and made one small pear then was removed when I wanted to reshape the tree. The novelty had worn off by then.
On the other hand, I had a multigraft apple. Not sure of the interstem. The varieties were Rubinette, Queen Cox and Pristine, I added Dolgo crab, Goldrush, King David and Hawkeye. Everything took and survived, most thrived, then the Pristine branch just fell off at the graft union, Probably six years old, quite productive, maybe 8 feet tall. Semidwarf tree. There was one sliver of cambium connecting, the end survived long enough I took some to graft, parked it temporarily on Akane and now on Bud nine. Doing fine. No idea why that thriving graft failed.
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@elivings1, I don’t see why red flesh apples would not be considered apples either. Maybe because their parent is a different species from domestic apple. I pollinated The cultivar Redlove™ Calypso™ with pollen from Golden Sentinel. The pollen took, the seeds grew and they look like a mix of traits from the two cultivars so far. Crossing species is often done in making hybrids and grafting, so Im not sure the term “species” is that clear. Markus Korbelt of Lubera Nursery (Switzerland?) claims his Redlove™ apples are an entirely new kind of fruit, not really apples. I think that’s a marketing thing. That’s like saying nectarines aren’t really peaches even though they came from peaches and interbreed easily and are really just nonfuzzy, maybe sweeter peaches. They look to me like apples, the trees look like apple trees, and they are graft compatible and cross pollinate.
That was the point of this thread, that you have multiple species that are readily able to graft together. Even if it’s apples to apples, if those apples are a different species then it should count.
American persimmon and Asian persimmons are different, but they’re still persimmons. Middle Eastern apples are different than North American apples in the same way.
In most grafting books they talk about grafting within genus ( with some exceptions that take but form weak trees over time) so technically Malus on Malus, Pyrus on Pyrus etc.