How long have you been doing this? Would love to see a seedling a few years old as well as a seedling you grafted on/harvested apples from!
Because store brought apples are refrigerated, the seeds from them tend to germinate within 1-2 months. If the seeds start germinating when the weather is not good to support them, then you can grow them in doors. Iām in Jamaica so i donāt have experience with dealing with cold climates.
My current project started in 2021. I havenāt gotten any fruits yet, but a Pink lady I grafted last year started to Blossom last Saturday.
Check out these post I made:
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Normally in the Northern hemisphere apples bloom in the spring, like April.
I suppose Iām not sure what to expect in your climate. Here, apple blooms in October or November are doomed, it doesnāt matter if they get cross pollinated.
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Hereās my 2 cents from New Zealand.
I have dozens of apple seedlings from store bought apples. Pink Lady, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith. I tend to find that in the winter here the stored apples have seeds that are already sprouting in the apples, so itās a low effort endeavour to plant them out and see what happens.
I cut the tops off some that were vigorous enough to have graftable material and top grafted those few to existing trees. Then I planted them all out in a grid and theyāre taking off now in our warm summer. If theyāre terrible Iāll graft onto them as rootstock, as per thread. If theyāre good Iāll graft them onto other existing trees andā¦ I donāt know.
Thereās a relevant video from today on Youtube where someone planted out a store bought Granny Smith seed and gotā¦ an inedible crabapple cross. Iād link it but I canāt include linksā¦ shrug.
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I wonder if you start with seeds from apples that are naturally somewhat dwarfing, such as Goldrush or spur strain Ark Black you might get some of that influence in the seedling.
At any rate I would advise people experimenting with this to not graft over the tree entirely to a scion and graft high enough after the seedling becomes a whip to allow at least a single scaffold to develop from the seedling. Why waste the chance to discover a new apple variety?
The odds of success may be small, but any fruit grower should be excited by the possibility.
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Nick Klasko on YT had the video. He suggested what I kind of thought. Commercial growers with thousands of acres just plop a flowering crab here and there to pollinate. Then you donāt have to worry about bloom times or workers picking and mixing two types of apples together. Oneās an apple like you see at the store, the otherās pea sized and tastes terrible.
You could also just graft whatever you want to grow onto the seedling and graft a piece of the top onto an existing tree. It may or may not fruit any sooner, and your standard sized tree can be on its way to production.
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Definitely, this is my preferred approach as a complete amateur with spare land and investing minimal time for a fun gamble.
I do wonder about the properties of the classic rootstocks with regard to disease resistance but no so much with size. Having read lots of romantic articles about the huge apple forests over in Europe where the apple came from or something, in theory I would think a seed grown tree would become 10 meters tall or something.
There are around 20 seed grown roadside trees around here. None are huge, theyāre all pretty standard sized trees. All except one are edible, the exception being a nice granny smith lookalike with sour flavour. None are disease affected in any way despite being alongside a dirt road where clouds of dust rise up and cover the trees on days when there hasnāt been any recent wet weather.