I have been an apple fanatic ever since i got out of Florida and got to pick apples off right off the trees. (Actually, mostly off the ground underneath!) They were mostly abandoned trees in England and east Tennessee. But for 35 years I’ve lived on the Highland Rim, which seemed nearly devoid of apples Have been gardening on horrible laterite clay that would barely grow weeds when we started, tho it improved. Have bought land with better soil now, and want to grow a REAL orchard, not these puny SD’s I’ve tried to work with. That’s the secret with this clay soil I’m sure, vigor! Works with veggies and old roses, should work with apples. What I REALLY want to do is the old piece-root grafting to make ownroot trees as standards. I want to leave behind the very sorts of big trees that fed me and my kids, trees planted by people I never met.
Apparently M111 is not the way to go. Our old neighbor said he couldn’t understand why people couldnt grow apples in our area. He said it must be the rootstocks, and I agree. I also believe it’s the scions, and the refrigerated trucks and storage from WA state undercutting any demand for the old varieties.
And beyond that, far far beyond that, was a sea change in how agriculture was passed on from generation to generation. By sending farm kids to college, agri-culture became “scientific” and “modern” culture. I have seen it in beans, I have seen it in roses, and I know it happened with fruit. A Nafexer journalist told me decades ago that it was common knowlege in journalism and garden publications (with reason I’m sure!) that “Southerners don’t read”. And as long as they didn’t read ag bulletins from Up North, and scoffed at “The Experts”, they kept their old varieties. NOW that knowlege is mostly lost, and we can thank those fanatic apple explorers for saving a little of it for us.
Look at the results, me for example, how many decades I eagerly devoured the literature on scab resistance before finding out that scab is totally a moot point in our region. If those damned SD rootstocks could have grown on our worthless clay, I have no doubt I’d have learned about summer rots the hard way, like Scott S. did!
I was in NAFEX for a couple decades, have hung out here a couple years, and so I know to avoid most stupid mistakes. I have had hi Ca lime put down, and need to start in spreading the 11 lbs/acre borax.
You’ve moved?
So…you’re going for standard rootstocks?
Any particular seed strain or species you’re considering using most strongly?
Theoretically my son will move there. It’s 4 miles away, and since we get lake effect, I checked the map and looks like that property will have it too. HOWEVER, Our place is not hit by the wind, instead the warmer air in fall and colder air, in winter and spring, creeps up the creek to our place from the lake to our west. Another factor is that trees hem us in at home, providing more wind protection, and lots of squirrels to eat my fruit.
Looking at the new property on Delorne maps, It looks like to the N and W there’s nothing higher than the gentle hilltop at 1060 ft. The new place is mostly neglected hayfield, plenty of broomsedge but some bluestem, esp on the better soil. That best area is a bit below the hill top, and more sheltered, but there are the damned trees over on the neighbors side. There’s fencerow as well with mostly young trees, tho my son is chopping sweet gums as fast as he can. I have a friend who wants to grow mushrooms, so I’ve asked him to wait till the leaves are off. Did you go to the Nafex meeting at Huntsville A&M where the woman researcher said you could grow shiitakes on sweet gum and they’d fruit faster? So you could grow em for almost no investment and certainly no land, because people would love for you to take the trash trees out of their fields. We saw the logs in a greenhouse, and the “contaminants” she pointed out were Turkey Tails, used for cancer in Japan. I pulled some off and showed her they were decent for chewing on. mushroom flavored of course.
Standard rootstock is easy. Dolgo gets very large and is somewhat available by scions you can nurse root. It use to be Antonova seeds were cheap and easy. But so many places have replaced them with ole Red Delicious seedlings being far cheaper for seeds.
If you want rootstock that is huge and has excellent root size and resistant to most all soil borne problems; P-18 would be my choice. Though it is susceptible to WAA. It is moderately resistant to fireblight like Red Delicious. Also being very cold hardy. It is said to be 95% the size of seedling.
There are other crabs and obscure rootstock really harder to locate. MM.109 is precocious as a large tree but is a leaner like B118.
Around here, WAA will eat up anything not resistant. Someone on here said that WAA ate their M111, but I note that just one of the 10 M111’s I bought in 2024 has WAA. That makes me think some nurseries may be mixing up their stock a little bit.
OK guys, so I got out my old book and copied the info for you. Piece-root grafting was done using root peices cut usually 2-3" long, using mostly whip and tongue. The grafts were wrapped with a few turns of thin “knitting cotton”, implying some stretch to it. Scions were usually 6-7" long. On the prairies, where breakage at the graft union was such a concern, only a 2" peice of root was used, with a scion 8-12" long. This would be buried up to the top bud.
So the new grafts were bundled together by 100’s, and stowed in a cool place to callus. One photo shows the amount of root growth on the scions by planting time, comparing callusing at varied temps. I put the book down before figuring out it they were planted in a nursery bed for a year, surely they are. It’s a great book, from the 40’s I think, showing the latest mule drawn nursery equipment.
These were the kind of trees where years later your friends and relatives could “dig a sprout” and get the scion tree.
I think you are beginning to digest the change in mindset required for this kind of grafting. If I order a scion for $5, I’ll get one tree from it. If I had access to a big tree, I could get a lot of scions, but I don’t know where there are any trees I want. In fact, I really don’t know where there are any apple trees at all, since Cookevillians have pretty much chopped down every apple I ever found growing there. Oh, I know a couple who had several YT and WR, but apparently 2,4D from tenant GMO farmers have been killing their trees.
And then theer’s the question of where to get root peices. I think I can manage that. About 20 years ago I got hold of some Micromalus seedlings because I’d seen what voles can do. I’m not sure they were a good choice, and certainly our horrible clay was a challenge to them, but Wm’s Pride, Liveland Raspberry, and Monark did okay on them. But the biggest seedling grew like crazy, and outgrew everything I tried to graft on it. I thought it must be a cross or just an ordinary seedling, but it leafs out with the micromalus sprouts on the grafted trees, blooms too early and has never set one fruit, even now with trees blooming beside it. Bet I can dig some roots there.
WAA is very preventable with fall sprays of dormant oil. As well as other maladies.
What about when the WAA are underground?
I have posted in other threads about how I discovered multiple M111 + G41 interstem roots infested on the M111, while the G41 portion was clean. These were rootstocks purchased by me from Cummins FYI, so hopefully they were true.
All this talk about apples.
I am a little west of you and apples are a struggle here (no spray). You may be ok with spraying… if so you may have much better luck with apples than I do. Good luck with the orchard.
Grow a few easy things like persimmons and mulberries… delicious and no spray needed.
TNHunter
There is no proven in ground treatment of WAA. But Fumigating trees with Black Mustard green fodder for root nematodes likely irritates aphids as well.
I’d point out breaking the life cycle over seasons usually ends the in ground issue if you are killing nymphs before they become breeding adults. If you kill them on the tree; the population in ground eventually ends too.
I’ve messed around with full size trees on their own roots. You can have them.
Black rot can kill a 25 year old full size tree quicker than fire blight simply because the infection is not conspicuous or because it’s inaccessible without machinery. I suspect only 10 percent of full-size trees make past 30 years. I’ve been able to locate only one tree within an hour of my house that may be approaching 100 years of age. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to remove leaves for IDing or harvesting scions.
I’m in the SE like you. I have two parcels, and I intend to sell the parcel that has the full-size own-root trees. Most have died or were cut down because they made such a god-awful mess. Sadly, there are no deer to help.
I’m going all in on tall spindle with dwarf rootstock. Weepy limbertwigs seem to be a perfect fit for this. Winesaps and Black twigs are semi weepy as well. I suspect if the Appalachian folk had G41s in the mid 1800s, they would’ve used them.
Concerning propagation of full-size trees, heed the advice of @dannytoro1. I’ve had numerous pieces of apple pruning refuse grow roots before the brush pile was burned. Take some very narrow cuttings and jam them into very fertile soil in your vegetable garden a few inches in Jan, place a mason jar over it. You will likely have very fine hair roots on the twig by March.
Oh my, what a lot of interesting advice! And yes, I love persimmons, the one fruit that does really well in our soil & climate, but the cursed row crop farmer keep damaging my best tree with his 2,4D. A wild tree cropped pretty well this year because the wind kept the drift going away from it, over toward the grafted tree and my 30 old chestnuts. And the garden of course, and the house.
KPS, your observations are shocking, but my criteria in the past was that if something had survived 30 years in Tennessee, I wanted to grow it. It seemed that few fruit trees achieved that. The spindles with the weepy branches sound like fun. And since I was planning as usual to root roses that way, I may try that with some apple cuttings too.
Oh yes. Rooting by cutting. I tried that. Very, very few made it btw. If I tried that again; I would root the cuttings far earlier in a dark, warm place. Let them develop those tiny roots for an extra month or two.
Seems they start leafing out very well. Then suddenly the tiny roots can not keep the sapling going.
Methods for rooting roses should work for apples as well.
My wife has about 90% success rate without rooting hormone with roses with the following approach.
Place cutting in ground about 6 inches. With an apple, leave only one bud above ground.
The cutting should be placed in the ground at the NE side of your home at the front end of dormancy. Place a jar over the cutting or seal scion just as one would if grafting. Keep the cutting protected until the heat rolls in in April.
Now that we’re discussing this, I may give it a try.
This will be entirely variety dependent. Some will root very easily, some won’t at all even in darkness
Bramley’s seedling is a very vigorous and FB resistant variety known to root very well from hardwood cuttings after leaf fall
I find soaking whatever type of cutting in water for a week or two improves viability some.
Rooting hormone works.
Agreed. I use that before inserting into soil.
KPS Thank you for your remark on black root rot. I had never heard of it, got out my 1953 USDA Plant Dieases book (it’s a great resource for me!) and found that we are pretty much in the middle of the area it frequents. Of course the next subject was Armillaria root rot, and that’s when I got really alarmed. Our property with all the trees around us, and trying to grow back from stumps in cleared areas, is just alive with Armillaria.
So, if the ground I want to plant on has any bits of unrotted roots from infected trees, it can get into the orchard. I know something about the history of our new property, and it was.in row crops 35 years ago,
and pasture since. Any chance the old tree roots are all gone?
And one thing that sort of concerns me is wondering if we could bring the armillaria to the new property on what, tools, shoes, tires? I kind of think not, because it’s the mycelium that is established on the old property, and that could travel in moist soil, as in potted plants. But I don’t think that dried out mycelium is a danger. As for a new orchard, that is no more subject to Armillaria spores falling and finding perfect conditions for growth than any other place. I just have to plant far away from existing trees, which I plan to do anyway because of squirrels!
And that brings me back to the notion that standard trees may not be more long lived here than SD’s. While I’m not sure I want to go as small at the stocks used in tall spindles, I think that SD stocks like G890 and G210 may be more productive in the first 20 years or so, and probably as productive for the future after that. But what are the varieties people have found to be compatible or incompatible with Geneva rootstocks?
Well, there’s nothing like reading about Geneva rootstock failures to really focus the mind! The top of the new property is very windswept, and I am realizing that I won’t be putting smaller Geneva rootstocks on it. The ones I have, including a number of small grafted trees in pots, can be planted closer spaced in what will be garden, as the level of attention to the soil between the rows will lead to earlier and more generous apple crops.
Unfortunately, in deciding that I needed to not buy any more Geneva stocks, I failed to look hard at info on B118… Cummins doesn’t say they are susceptible to WAA, they just don’t say they are resistant. I once had a friend ask me to look at a 4 year old very stunted Granny Smith tree. I didn’t know much about WAA at the time, but the little whitish clusters on exposed roots did not look like a good idea.