For several years now I’ve been experimenting with improved seedlings of fruits and nuts I believed would produce a usable product. Below are some of my initial findings. If you have experience with other types of seedlings include your story below.
Heartnut- 10 total trees. Of the ones that have fruited the results have been outstanding. Some are near a 100% reproduction of the parent.
Hazelnut- 28 total trees (not all seedlings). These are just getting started, but it’s looking like the size suffers a little on these. When you can get 5 for the price of a named variety I’ll take the 5 though. Needs more time to make a good observation.
Pawpaw- These have been the most surprising. All of the seedlings are from named varieties and although quite different from the parent still very good fruit. Some possibly better than many named varieties. Don’t waste your time on wilds.
Peach- Only did a few of these and the results were a mixed bag on the bad side. Most of them tasted OK to good, but most turned out smaller. If you have the space they are fun to play with, but I say stick with grafted.
I am doing peach right now and have about 16 seedlings, some as tall as 1 foot.
I am hesitant to plant all these in the ground just to find out 4 years from now that they’re not worth keeping. I guess I could keep them in pots but I don’t want to screw up the roots. Did you plant in the ground?
All were planted in the ground. You can always graft them over to something better later if they disappoint you. Some of them will be worth keeping. My gripe was the radically different results. Some were good, some trash, and most in the middle.
Loring, harvester, and others. I really did not pay attention to what was used. It was more just for fun. If someone took the time to control the varieties and the pollination, there would most likely be better results.
As a generalization, walnuts often are as good as the parent tree. Pecans rarely produce good seedlings. I’m growing a few hundred pecan seedlings with plans to graft most of them to selected varieties. Muscadines are interesting in producing about 1/3 very good seedlings.
I grew about 300 pecan seedlings a few years ago, then carefully selected 45 to set out here at my house. I picked the trees with the least leaf disease. Of the 45 seedlings, exactly 1 has shown promise by having less scab and powdery mildew. I’ll keep that one tree and graft the rest to varieties like Gafford, Adams #5, Creek, and similar.
I’ve been tempted to try the supposed cold hardy ones in my zone 7. I wonder if seeds from the cold hardy varieties might do better. Certainly cheaper.