Parents are manipulated . Get with the program. Look at baby Jays and how they run their parents about. I see no difference as if on the chance that in the next generation it is easier. No guarantees as like garden foibles all can be reflected in life foibles. Worthless in the eye of the perceiver. Some bird or woodpecker may differ. Don't worry about work expended its what we do and hope for no wars or car accidents.
Your option sit and rock or go for it.
Bill
I'm not angry. I'm just have a different take on the situation.
Me thinks thou doth project too much.
Bill
Juice those blood oranges, they make great sangria.
If you have little kids that are into grossness, make some ice cubes with the juice then put the ice cubes in their regular OJ. Bleeding ice cubes in OJ, or just give them the juice and tell them it's Vampire Breakfast.
Bill
Wait a minute. This guy is going to put lots of labor into caring for this tree, and 5 or more years down the road, he is going to wind up with a junky apple, unless of course you believe in miracles, but that's not where I would put my money or time. If he really wants a good tasting apple, let him shell out 15 or 20 bucks and buy something decent. I'm not going to even mention grafting, as I think he has not reached that point of involvement in growing apples.
Sherwin D.
Bill wrote:
tree, and 5 or
course you believe in
not reached that point
and maybe have some fun doing it. Did you ever try something that you didn't know ahead of time how it would turn out?
Just like with car mechanics, you better know who you are dealing with. I bought my first fruit trees from Franks Nursery
15 years ago, and they all came out as specified. Now I generally deal with mail order companies who ship small grafted whips. Even these people are not all reliable, a good indication is asking them what rootstock the tree is planted on. If they can't tell you, the warning buzzers should go off.I'm surprised you went back to the same nursery for Seckel Pears, after your experience with the Navel Oranges.
Your suggestion about grafting your own trees is basically good, but how many people know how to graft, and how sure can you be that the scion is what you think it is. Again, there are reputable companies out there who you can depend on for sending the correct scion.
Your last suggestion for a 5 in 1 apple tree is not a good one from my experience. These kinds of trees I have found to be weak and die rather quickly.
By the way, the biggest effect of a rootstock is on the size of the tree, and in some cases its productivity, not the taste of the apples on it.
Sherw> sherwindu wrote in
Hello, more warning bells.
Top posting fixed.
tree, and 5 or
course you believe in
You're omnipotent enough to forcast what's going to happen in 5 years but don't believe in miracles! Wow.
not reached that point
Maybe he just wants to experiment, or possibly have some father son time.
Bill
God bless America!
I think it's a good thing that people have an opportunity to make stupid choices, don't you? Otherwise life would be kind of boring. Especially in the suburbs.
BTW, I like the pear tree that came up from a seed at my parent's house
10 or so years ago. It's about 30 feet tall (pears grow straight up like a poplar if they get a chance) and it's way too close to the garage. It is disease free and has hard little pears a little bigger than a walnut, and thorns like a honeylocust. It has a lot of character. :-) I think the pears would make good pickles.Best regards, Bob
This whole thread seems much ado about nothing. EVERY seedling apple tree produces edible fruit - the problem is that most seedlings will produce fruit that is too sour for most people's taste. A lot of sugar will turn those apples into delicious apple pies, apple sauce, apple butter, or can be mixed with other types of apples to make a great cider. There's a wild park area in my town. There are quite a few seedling apple trees there. Russian families go there in the fall and gather the fruit for something. (Homemade vodka?) Having tasted a lot of those apples, I can tell you definitively, they are not choice varieties......LOL Now, if most apple seedlings produced poisonous fruit, with only a few select kinds being non-poisonous, that would be a different situation entirely. However, if a person has a small yard, a questionable apple tree seems a waste of space. Apples are not my personal favorites as trees OR as fruit, but to each his own - and every tree has beautiful fragrant flowers for 2 weeks or so in the spring, so that counts as something.
I guess I'll never be able to sell this house with it's 23 fruit bearing trees and schrubs I've planted around it. I paid a hundred and fifty grand for it 10 years ago and did have to remove an ash tree , an old plum that died of heart rot, a peach that had termites, a lemon tree that was in bad shape, oleander < don't like oleander>, 6 Hollywood Junipers, and 4 Italian Cypress. These had all died or had become heavily drought stressed because they hadn't been watered in 6 months. The house was a repo/fixer upper.
The lemon I took out came back as a sucker from one of the roots I missed. It's about 5 feet tall now and puts out some nice lemons. Yup, I just left that sucker grow just to see what it would do.
I sometimes wonder if that lemon tree started from some child of one of the previous owners sticking a seed in the ground.
The real estate agents that come up and knock on my door every week must be pulling my leg. They insist they can get $500,000 or more for my house if I'll let them carry the listing. Those real estate agents must be real kidders, going around door to door and ribbing people like that.
God Bless the USA.
Bill
Bill expounded:
But we've already been told that the child will lose interest in five minutes, so the father shouldn't bother (good thing my mother 'bothered', I followed her around her herb garden and found a lifestyle I love).
Sure, I think it good that people have the opportunity to fail. Still, I am grateful when I pick up a plant at the nursery and have a trusted staff person tell me that the plant is likely to be inferior or become invasive. If they engage me in WHY I am buying the plant and help me sort out what would fulfill my needs, I see it as a service. I could go to Wal-Mart and take my chances. There are so many opportunities to make mistakes that when someone gives me advice that helps avoid failure, I see it as a benefit. I still might go with my first decision, but it will be an informed one.
One example of how stupid mistakes makes life more boring in the suburbs occurred in my neighborhood. The developer put in a large number of Bradford Pears and planted many trees far too close to the houses. The pears are all breaking in strong winds and the trees planted too close to the houses are being removed. Now the lots are being transformed into really boring landscapes. Some people don't believe in stump removal, so not only is there are loss of trees, but now stumps dot small lawns. Had someone stopped the person choosing the plant material and discussed alternatives to the Bradford pears and suggested that planting a tree three feet from the foundation is not a good idea, I think things would be less boring. Of course, reasonable people will disagree.
The message from Charles contains these words:
He's probably a virgin, also.
Janet
Absolutely. And if the experiment is a bust, you have apple wood for smoking meat and fish.
Bill
The message from sherwindu contains these words:
No, it's recommending that gardening is an area where producing the perfect result is not the sole, or even the most important purpose. What matters is for a child who has eaten an apple and sprouted its pip, to feel the magical connection to the earth and his part in the cycle of growing things. For a child to learn that the simplest personal involvement is more satisfying than any item or experience made by someone else or bought from a shop. For him to learn that it's good to experiment and explore, that often, what is most worthwhile and entertaining is not uniform, not predictable, and far from perfect.
A neighbour of ours was an old man who has lived in his childhood home all his life. As a boy he grew an apple pip which is now a large espalier against the gable end of the house. It's beautiful in blossom, it's his creation and part of his history and memories. Those are far more important than the very trivial fact that he doesn't like the fruit. Birds do, and their annual feasting probably gives him more joy and delight than any apple he's ever tasted.
Janet.
"K. Kly" wrote in news:f snipped-for-privacy@adelphia.com:
++++++This is a verbatim copy from the following URL ....
Did You Know?
The Red Delicious apple was discovered by a Quaker
Jesse Hiatt, a Quaker farmer in Peru, Iowa, found the seedling growing out of place in his orchard in 1872 and chopped it down. It grew back the next year and he chopped it down again. When it grew back the third year, he said, "If thee must grow, thee may."
For the next ten years, he cared for the apple seedling without knowing what it would produce. Apples freely cross breed and mutate, with results that can be spectacularly unpalatable or sublime. Jesse knew the gamble, having already developed two varieties, Hiatt Sweet and Hiatt Black.
When the tree finally produced its fruit, Jesse declared it the ?best- tasting apple in the world? and originally named it Hawkeye after the state where he made his home with his wife and ten children. The new breed was re-christened ?Delicious? after it won first prize in a contest in Louisiana, Missouri.
Jesse died in 1898 at the age of 72. The original Red Delicious tree survived him until the 1940s, and even after it died, sprouts grew up around the stump.
(End of Quote)
Good Luck ....
The message you are not giving this little boy is that there is better fruit available than what he can find in the supermarkets. He will have no motivation to get into gardening with the memory of that awful apple he bit into.
Sherw> The message
available than
gardening with the
I disagree. As Joyce Kilmer said, "Only God can make a tree", and the little boy got a chance to help.
-Bob
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