Apple Tree From Seed

[Buck Turgidson]

As a "teachable moment" with my little kids, I we put some seeds from some apples we ate in a planter. Now, 6 weeks later, some appear to have sprouted. Will these do well here in the DC area?

Thanks.

[betsyb]

Probably if your children live to a ripe old age?

[Dwayne]

Plant them. They wont be the same kind of apple that they came out of, but will revert to the kind of fruit that the rootstock came from. They will still bear fruit, normally within 4 to 6 years. In any case they kids will be proud of what they accomplished.

Dwayne

[zxcvbob]

The fruit will probably be awful, but it will be edible. (and it might be good for jelly, or for pickles, or cider.)

Worst case, it takes 10 years for the trees to bloom, the fruit is nasty, and you can graft a good variety onto the big branches and convert it to a good tree. Best case, you discover a wonderful new apple variety and you can name it.

Best regards, Bob

[sherwindu]

They can grow allright, but don't expect the resultant apples to taste anything like the apple the seeds came from. It's a genetic thing. The resultant apples are some combination of the original tree and whatever pollinated it. Almost always, the resultant apples taste terrible. Instead, you should teach your kids how to propagate apple trees by grafting techniques. Check the web for more information.

Sherw> As a "teachable moment" with my little kids, I we put some seeds from some

[sherwindu]

Dwayne,

I generally agree with you about the bad results from planting an apple seed. However, I disagree that it will have any relationship to the rootstock, assuming the original tree that grew the apple was grafted onto that rootstock. The rootstock does not transfer it's genetic material to the resultant apple. What spoils this apple planted from seed is that it is affected by the pollinator and all the recessive genes built into that seed. I think what you are confused about is when a branch grows out of the rootstock below a graft and starts producing apples. In that case, the resultant apple would have the characteristics of the rootstock.

Sherw> Plant them. They wont be the same kind of apple that they came out of, but

[sherwindu]

Don't get his hopes up. The chances for a good apple emerging from a planted seed are very small. That being said, there are some very famous apples like the Cox's Orange Pippen that originated from a seedling. The very word pippen means seed. That was a very chance occurance, and most orchardists don't waste their time trying to develop new apples from seedlings.

Sherwin D.

[Kay Lancaster]

It may depend on the winter ahead of you. Plants in planters tend to experience much colder winter temps than those in the ground. And planters tend to be either over- or underwatered. Which is a long way of saying look first for yourself next spring, if you think the kids will be badly disappointed if they apple seedlings didn't make it.

[kaspian]

Sure, the little saplings ought to grow into healthy young trees, which will do fine in the DC area -- IF you can get them through this first winter.

It's probably too late to "harden them off" sufficiently to leave outdoors. Nonetheless, it would be a good idea, as long as the weather remains above freezing, to put them in separate pots (with a generous amount of space for young growing roots) and leave these outdoors exposed to the elements. This will produce stronger and tougher saplings than leaving them in an inside window.

The best thing for the coming months would probably be a cool greenhouse, or perhaps a sunny window in an unheated basement. Failing that, you'll have to try with an ordinary sunny window, preferably not in a spot near a heat outlet or radiator. Unnatural heat, coupled with dim indoor light, is a bad combination that encourages weak, lanky growth.

In that regard also, you should avoid giving them too much fertilizer, and especially fertilizer with a high nitrogen (N) content -- the first number in a fertilizer formula like 15-10-10.

If you've got a LOT of seedlings, you might do well to select a small number to pamper through the winter. In cases like this, I used to let each kid pick ONE plant as his or her own. They could decorate the pot, and they were nominally responsible for caring for the plant (though in practice I mostly took care of this, for the plants' sake).

Next spring, if all goes well, you can reverse the process -- when the weather begins to warm, gradually begin introducing the plants to the wild, until they acclimate to the stronger sunlight and harsher weather conditions. Remember when you finally plant them to allow plenty of room to grow. It will be great fun for the kids as the years go by -- IF we can pull through the few months ahead.

[sherwindu]

Why put all this effort into an apple tree that will produce lousy tasting apples. I mean, isn't growing an apple tree for the apples the main objective of all this? Put a little extra effort into doing a graft in the spring of a known variety. Grafting is really not that difficult. Various clubs and institutions teach it or you can learn how to do it from books, or the web. If you just want to see if you can get apples from seeds, you probably have to wait at least 7 years to see one. By then, the kids will have gone on to other endeavors. If they graft an apple tree to a dwarf rootstock, they might see some apples in a much shorter time. I have had apples appear only two or three years after grafting them onto dwarf rootstock. Standard trees, like those grown from seeds, take much longer to bear fruit.

As in life, with apple trees there are few good shortcuts or quick fixes.

Sherwin D.

kaspian wrote:

I bury my pots in the garden to keep the soil inside them from freezing.

They really don't need sunlight, as they go dormant in the winter months.

Especially if they are planted from seeds. They will produce full size apple

trees, over 20 feet, which are a pain to maintain and harvest. Another reason to make the trees on dwarfing rootstock that can be as small as 6 feet high.

[Jo Ann]

I really don't think the OP's goal here is to grow apples. As I read it, the goal is to grow children's minds. For that purpose, planting seeds from apples is an ideal activity.

Jo Ann

sherw> Why put all this effort into an apple tree that will produce lousy tasting

[hob]

maybe -

1) The seed is a DNA combination of the top portion of the tree holding your apple, and the DNA of another tree somewhere nearby - and if it is a commercially grown apple, it was likely one of the nearby trees was in the same orchard.

2) many apple tops are grafted onto rootstocks, and your variety may have a weak disease susceptible root, or the variety has a small root that doesn't support a full tree of that type of apple without pinching.

3) I believe most apples are hardy in the DC area - so it should grow.

4) My father, a county agent, often said that you could never tell what kind of apple you were going to get from an apple seed (Something about the fruit not being the same from a seed as from a parent, even when the two parents are of the same variety.)

so plant it, and see what happens.

If it survives the rabbits, the deer, the kids, poor soil and planting, and the pollution, it will probably grow.

fwiw

[Kay Lancaster]

You're sure about that? cv Delicious was a chance seedling (and they're very nice apples when they haven't been subjected to storage!) Likewise, most of the heirloom apples are chance seedlings, and I'll take a Cox's Orange Pippin or an Arkansas Black over a Fuji any day.

Kids enjoy having their own plants... or at least I sure did. Kay's Pear, while it never produced world-class commercial fruits, produced acceptable home fruit, and it was *mine*. And I've gotten some very good no-name apples out of local roadsides, probably planted by birds.

Sometimes, especially when you're a kid, it's nice to go against the flow of uniformity and find out what happens in an uncontrolled experiment.

Kay

[Carl 1 Lucky Texan]

Couldn't you just surreptitiously swap the seeds for known, 'quality' cultivar seeds?

Carl

[Farm1]

I think that many chance seedlings produce fruit that is not only edible but quite good.

Each year we visit a lot of chance seedling trees and eat and harvest the fruit. If we can beat the birds to them, most are good to very good and those that aren't are fine for cooking. These trees grow along a very quiet country road and we are sure have grown from apple cores thrown from passing cars. There must be at least 100 of these trees and we watch and check with interest each year.

[sherwindu]

Naturally, only the successful chance seedlings were passed down through the years. The thousands, or perhaps millions of them that were just awful are not around anymore. Statistically, the successful chance seedling is a rarity. I personally would not put a lot of time and care into an apple tree with those kinds of odds.

There are a few things I have grown that I'm glad no one knows about. Exactly how did you grow this Kay pear? Was it a sport of some well known pear, a seedling of some known pear, or a complete chance seedling?

Or, they came from a known variety tree that lost it's identity somewhere along it's lifetime. Speaking of modern genetically produced apples, have you tasted some of the newer ones like Cameo, Honeycrisp, Rubinette, etc., etc. If you look in the Fruit, Nut, and Berry Inventory book of available varieties, you will find the chance seedlings there, but only a small percentage of the total offerings. I say, leave it up to the experts to do the experimenting, when there are so many good apples of known parentage out there. Encouraging a kid to put his energies into a losing venture is not a good introduction to gardening.

Sherwin D.

[sherwindu]

You missed the point. The resultant apple will have the genetic makeup of some

recessed genes, and will not resemble the original apple, no matter what. You can't faithfully reproduce apple trees from seed, and in most cases, not even come close. Leave it at that.

Sherwin D.

[hob]

[hob]

Are you saying that natural selection through the history of the apple has led to a fruit that is desired by birds/animals, and a more desirable apple for the propagation vector to eat spreads the seed better than apples that are bitter and tasteless?

Who woulda thunk...

[Kay Lancaster]

Please, please... pick up a good basic genetics book and do some reading. "Recessed genes"? You think they're on holiday break? Better yet, a good basic plant breeding text sounds like it needs to be on your list.

There are some really interesting issues in apple genetics, including ploidy levels, polygenic inheritance and a tendency to "bud sport". In fact, it's fairly common to find an oddball branch on a grafted tree, clearly tissue grown from the graft, but with different fruit characters from most of the rest of the tree. Chimerism and mosaicism have played an important part in the development of a lot of tree fruit cultivars.

Genetic diversity isn't something to be scorned...

Kay