One of my apple seedlings is proving to be a very heavy cropper of medium sized delicious apples. The growth is very unusual. Anyone seen another apple with similar growth? The entire tree is nothing but fruit Spurs.
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Miller’s sold quite a few spur type trees before Stark’s bought them out. I bought a few of them and they were indeed prolific but very slow growers. I had a spur RD on bud 9 and after 15 yrs it was 8’ tall but a bunch of apples, roped them almost to the ground because everything had spurs on it.
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Congratulations. Sounds like a keeper to me. I have a few seedlings grafted onto a dwarf tree but I don’t have any fruit yet.
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I see a lot of wild trees like that here-I have been on the lookout for trees I can dig out as rootstock and the trade-off is it’s very easy to identify apples when they’re of the spurry things even at 4-6 feet tall but that’s also not exactly what I want for my rootstock as I’m worried about runting out at 8 feet tall
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My tree is about 15-20’ tall but I bet you could get it half that height with dwarfing rootstock.
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I REALLY liked Miller Nurseries. I am sad that they sold off to Stark Bros. Their products will go will definitely go by the wayside. I have noticed their products do not get any fanfare on Stark Bros site. I bought plenty of their products over the years. In fact after my last move my neighbor has a few of the Miller Nursery fruit trees.
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I purchased so many mis-identified toothpicks sold as trees from Millers that I grew to despise them and their phony schpiel of having “extra hardy” trees, many of which they bought from other nurseries at clearance prices because the nurseries wouldn’t sell anything so small. Clonal varieties and rootstocks have the same hardiness, no matter where they are initially grown.
I did get an unidentified apple from them that actually turned out to be really good- wish I knew what it was.
Go to the nursery list, and I’m sure you can find another nursery to love. Starks at least has a commercial division so it is more likely to get identities straight, although I’ve not purchased from them in years.
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Wow, that is suprising to hear, at least from my experience. I do, however, remember the next door neighbor mentioning getting one tree that was way small and he said he was not sure if he received the right tree, Of course he could not remember since it was so long ago. It was supposed to be one type of apple but he actually was not sure what he had ordered from them.
I’ve found other nurseries to buy from. I guess it is just a part of nursery history I enjoyed more than their products. So many older nurseries have gone by the wayside, as well as so many different fruit varieties. Many varieties were not continued by the bigger nurseries that would buy out the smaller nurseries to make room for their own stock and their " special" varieties. The good old days were probably not as good as we would like to remember them to be.
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Fruit plants are so wonderful that even a mediocre source is great. I got lots of good plants from Miller’s and never had a problem with their berries- always true to name and I bet they propagated them. Problem is when you plant a tree for a client that’s supposed to be Green Gage and it turns out to be a terrible purple variety that shouldn’t even be cloned- a lot of good will goes out the window in a hurry.
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