This is a roughly 5 year old tree. Spent a couple years in a container then into the ground. Several grafts are on this tree, but this isn’t any of those. I have no idea what the parentage is. Probably store bought something or another.
Very clean for no (fungicide) sprays other then a little spray to keep the PC out of the apples.
Wow. five years to fruit on a seedling ! Always exciting to find out how a unknown apple is going to taste. I have a much older tree that grew on its own with fruit for the first time this year . It took much longer to fruit as it is on the riverbank behind the house and the beavers thought it would make a tasty meal several years ago and cut it down. So it had to start over from the roots .
Keep observing it and tell us how it tastes. Who knows – you may have found the next ‘it’ apple.
That is a big big “if”… i was reading some very old publication. Something like 10,000 seedlings were planted on some farm and nothing good came of any of them! Not sure if they were looking for something special or what…but i didn’t find those odds very good! Not sure how many U of Minn grows out, but i bet its a ton. We’ll see…if its ok, i’ll keep it around.
Here is another seedling. 2nd year i think… its about 6’5 even in that little 7 gallon pot. It needs to be put in the ground asap. Once again, i have no idea the parentage.
Maybe restricting the roots in those pots causes early fruit…who knows.
Less than 1 in 10,000 would be great odds for the lottery. Something else to note is that as the tree matures, the taste of the apple does too. A few of the low-chill apples you can get in Southern Cal have come from hobby/small timer’s who scored the right characteristics from chance seedlings – eg. Pettingill, Gordon, Dorsett Golden. Don’t underestimate your chances of getting a decent apple from a seedling.
There’s a huge difference than commercially superior and “good”. The book, “Old Southern Apples” talks a bit about how the heat of the south made the grafted apples brought from Europe fairly worthless, a problem solved by planting bags of seeds. The results were described as producing “many rather decent” eating apples, with the rest being cider quality. The general impression the book gave was that it didn’t used to be all that uncommon to simply start with a row of apple seedlings, and pick the best of the row, then trade your best with your neighbors best. To me, that implies even if the ratio is dozens or even a hundred to one, you can fit a hundred apple seedlings into a fairly small space.
Also, the genetics of the parents are going to matter a ton, if one of the parents is a second or third generation known heritage of good eating apples, your odds begin to dramatically improve. It’s the F2 generation that is the most interesting and most likely to fail. The more generations of breeding people do, the better our odds get to have the traits we like, or the more likely we accidentally breed for unintended consequences (for example, accidentally favoring young bearing apples and breeding for dwarfism).
Another thing I wanted to point out is that it seems your seedling may be fairly precocious – it might convey that to grafted varieties as well. Therefore it could be a good rootstock – and if it has any natural dwarfing that would be a bonus. So save any suckers you get, harvest and graft on them.
Just remember that a large number of seedlings are weeded out for other reasons before they produce fruit with commercial breeding programs. Also remember that picking the winners and losers is very subjective . Honeycrisp for example was designated as a loser but was saved by someone with a little different idea of what it could be!
Modern commercial fruit breeders generally seem to suffer from very heavy blinders - they want X and they are going to pull out all the stops to get X. Even if they find Y and Z which are ten times better than X, they are driving to X – no detours allowed!
Don’t worry, your chances are a lot better than one is 10,000. In 1899 at the Geneva Ag research station, they planted 106 seedlings of intentional crosses, 13 of them were deemed worthy of propagation and naming, Clinton, Cortland, Herkimer, Nassau, Onondaga, Otsego, Oswego, Rensselaer, Rockland, Saratoga, Schenectady, Schoharie, Tioga, Westchester, and 14 deemed worthy of further testing, but not worth naming. The big breeders have a lot of criteria to meet, so they do grow very large numbers to find their releases. But that doesn’t mean all the ones that don’t make the cut are total losers. What I’m hearing from people is that you have a pretty good chance with open pollinated seed, though of course it will depend on the quality of the seed parent and what pollinated it. Selecting quality open pollinated apples in an orchard full of quality apples, my friend says he gets more apples that are worth eating than are not.
Good to know. It’ll be a few months before i try them… I have some more seedlings that i hope to bud over to mature trees and get them into production fast.
So how did this apple ever turn out?
Its still going. The apples are nothing great. They seem to ripen early. Birds peck them like crazy. I tried juicing a bunch of them last fall, but it didn’t work so great ///it was more like apple sauce. I pruned the tree hard last summer and this spring//just to open it up. Sets lots of fruit. I’ll see if i can find some pictures from last fall of the fruit.
One in 10,000…and all the rest NO GOOD?
Extremely doubtful.
Of 10,000 and not getting one you like better than the one the seeds came from…that could be.
But of
10,000 there
should be hundreds of decent apples of value to someone…maybe even 1,000 or 3,000.
I’ve run across a fair number of apple trees that look to be seedlings, and most of them have edible, if not great apples; a couple have been terrific off the tree. How long they’d store, how well they’d ship, how they’d cook or juice, all different questions. Point is, though, I think the odds actually favor getting something better than “no good”.
I assume they’re seedlings if they’re very badly placed and/or have multiple trunks.
I’m of the opinion your Montana location, and places such as Vermont and Maine
are quite like Kazakstan…supposed home of the original apples. Seedlings don’t come up much around here in nature. (Bradford pears do though!)
