Just curious will you keep all your fruit trees small? Or is this just a younger tree? I’ve been serious considering keeping all mine only to about 6-7’ tall. I am not interested in climbing ladders or trees to pick apples any longer. On ground level picking is fine with me and my body.
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Yes.
Yes, for my height anything above 8’ is literally for the birds.
Now apple trees don’t readily conform to scaffolding like a pit fruit, but I do a modified form of it anyway. You can see from the photo that I’ve got a lower basis of supporting limbs and then I’m allowing uprights and some wandering from there. All of this is focused on getting fruit spurs to form in the 2’ to 7’ range.
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Thanks for sharing! It must be confusing being a apple tree in zone 10. Poor trees never get to rest there.
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that’s great!! I’m jealous…hard for me to imagine walking out into my backyard and finding apples under the tree…
Nice looking tree and fruit. Is the normal time of the year that the apple ripens? I had been looking at the WWP and what I saw was they ripen Sept/Oct. If they normally ripen this late I do not think I could have one in my orchard. We have had temps in the 20’s last week and ice and snow today. I am not sure if they would ripen correctly if the really ripen this late in the year.
LOL! Nope. In my climate it has 3 crops a year.
Now THAT makes sense. TY for the explanation. I figure these are good apples or you would have taken it out by now.
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Richard,
Do you think you could possibly set aside seeds from those White Winter Pearmains and mail me some?
I’m experimenting with growing seedling fruit trees and one of my needs right now is for seeds from a much wider variety of cultivars than what I have at the moment.
BTW, out of curiosity, where are located? Southern California somewhere?
Thanks!
Are you aware that Apple cultivars do not grow true from seed?
WWP is unpatented. Check the scion threads on this site for offerings.
Richard,
Yes, I’m very much aware that they don’t grow true from seed and that people propagate cultivars using grafting techniques. In fact, I’m growing my own M111 rootstock right now, for example.
All of our current cultivars started out from seeds.
My plan is to grow seedlings, let “survival of the fittest” wipe out the ones that are overly susceptible to disease, and when the survivors reach fruiting size, select the ones worth keeping (if any).
It is important to maintain genetic variation over the long-term in plants that are important food sources for humans as such variation will act as a buffer against any really nasty diseases that may arise (e.g., think of what chestnut blight did to the American chestnut). Since there’s not much money to be made (if any), this task mostly has to fall on the shoulders of hobbyist gardeners.
The plan is that if I do come up with some trees that are keepers, I’ll share scionwood with the folks on Growing Fruit. Also, as an added benefit I’ll get to name the cultivars after my wife and kids (while not set in stone, this is my tentative plan) and I figure they’ll get a kick out of that.
Does that clear things up?
Thanks,
Andrew
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Muchtolearn…a noble undertaking. i HOPE you have lots of acres of land.
I’ll be happy to contribute seeds next year if you don’t get enough between now and then. bb
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BlueBerry,
Thank you very much!
While I have some land, it’s not acres and acres.
What I’m doing right now is to start seeds in plastic pots and suchlike. Since this is my first year of growing seedlings and I don’t have all that many yet, they are fairly manageable. Growing them in pots facilitates moving them around as needed, which is important as I may move next year.
Actually, I do have a fair bit of unused garden space available for growing seedlings if I need it.
There’s a good chance that sometime next year we’ll move and I’ll end up with a lot more space for this undertaking. If that doesn’t happen and my seedlings get overly large for my current situation, there’s a pretty good likelihood I’ll be able to arrange to use some land belonging to someone else.
So it will probably all work out.
Worst case, I imagine there are other people here on Growing Fruit who would be interested in providing the seedlings with homes and taking over where I had to leave off.
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Nice looking apples. Great winter treat.
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I believe that is a good choice for Virginia.
Yes. This is the prime task of the NCGR stations. The site in Geneva NY has joint responsibility with Davis CA for Malus. If you haven’t already, you might find it interesting to view the research publications of the plant geneticists with regard to primary, secondary, and tertiary material they have obtained from around the world.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/geneva-ny/plant-genetic-resources-research/
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Richard,
Thanks for pointing me along to that. Actually, I already know about that and have browsed their catalog a bit.
As you say, they are working to maintain genetic variation and are doing a very good job at it.
That said, I am still interested in growing seedling trees, both as a gardener who likes to experiment and from the standpoint of believing that increased genetic diversity does serve a useful purpose as an insurance policy against things like catastrophic plant diseases.
Yes, I’m not trying to discourage you! Rather, the genetic scientist there might help you with making choices about what to grow in order to maximize variation.
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White Winter Pearmain. Nice fruit in the picture, Richard. I grafted it onto G-30 last spring, so maybe I’ll have some before you know it.
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Is your White Winter Pearmain apple the same as the White Pearmain apple? Or are those two completely different apples?
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