One of my many hobbies is growing new varieties of apples from seeds. This year I have two of my seedlings that reached fruiting age that I thought you might like to see. As your likely aware I grow many unique rare or heirloom varieties of plants. These were grown with no spray since they were not expected to fruit so they do show insect damage.
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Thanks for sharing, keep posting !
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The apples on the left are a yellow variety and those on the right are a green. The yellow has little disease resistance similar to a tame apple but the green on the right is highly disease and insect resistant. Both are medium sized apples. I used the quarter for size reference. The green on the right is to me better flavored both sweet and sour like Fuji. The yellow is more sweet and course or mealy like a Rome. Time will tell how they do. Many of you have seen some of my other seedling apples or other fruits and a few people are growing them. My goal has always been to improve and preserve rare fruit varieties. In the case of these apples they are genetically diverse as they are wild apples grown from seed.
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Cool stuff, clarkinks. Thanks for persevering enough to get fruit. Maybe you’ll be remembered like that dude in Cali. some day!
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The results from your seedlings are interesting. Hope you will continue posting as your others start to fruit. Good luck, Bill
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Awesome! How many years do you have to wait for the seedlings to bear fruit?
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It really depends on the apple seedling. Typically they take 5-7 years to produce apples if I leave them on their own roots. If you want to speed up the process to 3 years the new tree can be grafted on a mature tree.
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I have been trying to do this for the last couple of years but my seedlings end up dying or being ate by rabbits.
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Orchardman,
One way I grow seedlings is to take 2 large tractor tires and fill them full of old manure. I then take a load of seedling apple cores, skins etc. from my wild trees and cover the entire surface of the inside of the tire. Then I cover the old cores etc with a few inches of dirt. The next spring I have hundreds of seedlings I leave growing in the tire all year. After the first year they are 6 inches to a foot tall and I go plant them out in pots or in a protected place. Use hail screen around them so the rabbits won’t get them the second year. The first year they are safe in the tire because they are several feet off the ground and rabbits don’t climb.
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To get the dirt in the second tire I used a foot wide plank and ran the wheelbarrow up the plank.
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Thanks that’s a good idea!. How often do you water them? I used to grow taters in old tires like that.
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This is a wet year so not at all this year because I only want the strongest apples and pears to live. I don’t spray them etc. because I’m looking for the fastest growing, drought and cold tolerant, insect and fungus resistant apples and pears possible.
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These plants are already telling me what they are. See the one apple with the leaves eaten on by bugs it’s sweet beyond sweet but highly disease resistant. Not a spot on any of the seedlings leaves. See the small pear seedlings they are not sweet at all because their leaves are pristine. See the different heights will correlate to vigor later. If that sweet , vigorous , drought tolerant apple gets through winter its a winner because it has all the other characteristics. Then we will see what size and color the apples are. Most of my wild apples seem to be green or yellow.
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Fast forward a few years and these are some of the results of my seedlings.
Once in awhile I get a low vigor, non disease resistant tree like this one
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Some of my seedlings are far better that I don’t have pictures of at this time. I have a green that did not produce this year at all but it’s apples look like a Granny Smith when ripe only lighter green. The size is the same as Granny Smith with a thicker skin. I’m overall very happy with my project because I have an exceptional apple gene pool with many producing normal sized apples. We got to many apples last year so many of my trees will wait until next year to bear heavy again. I tried not to damage the fruiting wood when I picked last year but I need to get better at that as well. I have a crabapple that bears so heavy it looks like clusters of grapes. Here are a couple pictures from last year
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Awesome! Most of the seedlings I have to come up get the cedar apple rust bad
I grew this seedling last year but a rabbit ate it last winter while their was a big snow on the ground.
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That’s a great looking seedling. Did it come back from the roots? You can paint the bottom with pruning sealer because the rabbits really hate that!
It died after that, It grew better than any seedling I had ever seen. Here is what the rabbit did to it.
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I need to paint all my grafts I have a large can of Morrisons.
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That’s to bad it looks like it was a really good apple tree. Sometimes if you leave them in pots the winter gets to cold for them because the pot makes it a zone or two colder. This one is my favorite for flavor. Its small but delicious!
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