I have a crapapple tree that has shown some interesting behavior the past couple years. Here's some history.
It's a fairly large tree, and when I got the house it was very lush. I should have had it pruned then, as it turns out. In about 2000, a major section split off from the main trunk and fell over. I had the whole tree pruned and reshaped at the time, which reduced its size considerably.
I was concerned over the following years that it might die, but it's rallied and looks pretty good.
Now the odd part. Starting last year, one branch of the tree has started to blossom in the fall. The last of them just fell off, so figure around mid-September. This year's have set some fruit. I don't know if the same branch blossomed in the spring when the rest of the tree did, and as we had a spring freeze here I can't tell by looking for mature fruit as they were all killed.
Has anyone heard of such a thing? To the best of my recollection, only these two most recent years have shown this. The branch is close to the driveway, so it's very noticable.
Someone may have grafted apples of a different variety on to the crabapple tree. That used to be a big fad a number of years ago and you can still buy trees online that have different branches of different apples. Crabapple trees were a favorite to use for this since many of them (particularly ones that aren't created purely as ornamental trees) in the good old days were not grafted trees.
These days most ornamental crabapples are grafted and virtually all production apple trees are grafted. But there's a movement out there against grafted apple trees and some growers are selling non-grafted ones.
I don't think so. If it were off on the other side of the tree by the neighbor's, then perhaps. But this is right by the driveway. The sight of one branch in blossom against the leaves is quite noticable, I'd had to not notice it for a number of years. It's possible.
Are there crabapples that bloom in the fall, on fully-leafed branches.
I don't know what kind of movement you are referring to. Grafting is still the only reliable way to reproduce apple trees. These ungrafted trees are limited to a very few apples, like Antonovka, but this variety is used more as a rootstock than an eating apple. Non-grafted trees take longer to produce fruit and eventually get too big to be managed properly.
No, sorry this isn't true. In actual fact there are two "non-grafted" movements on growing apple trees (and other fruit trees) The first is called "own-root" and the second is traditional "from-seed"
I don't know exactly where "own-root" started from but one of the centers of it is in the UK - here's a URL for you:
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Googling on the phrase will get you hundreds of hits. Unlike seed, and like grafting, this is a clone technique. Propagation is the usual method of putting a cutting in potting soil, with rooting hormone on the cutting, keeping it wet and in indirect light. The biggest problem with it is that for a lot of work your getting the same apple tree you could get by buying one of the mass-produced grafted-to-regular rootstock trees from a nursery, there's just not a lot of incentive for it.
As for from-seed growth, Google on "Apple tree from seed" and you will get hundreds of hits. A lot of people have started apple trees from seed and gotten good apples from them.
To make it simple for you:
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"...every apple seed can potentially produce a new variety. This is in part why more than 7,500 apple varieties have been identified worldwide..."
So please let's lose that "...grafting is the only reliable way to reproduce apple trees..." garbage.
Grafting is the only reliable way to produce genetic clones, ie: copies, of apple trees. That is why as I said production apple trees are grafted.
But, there are a great many hobby growers of apples that do from-seed growth in an effort to try to create new apple varieties and many people also seek out wild from-seed trees in an effort to find new apple varieties.
As the grocery selection of apples has waned - since grocers really only care about fruit that looks good and keeps for a long time - there has been a resurgence in interest in hobby breeding for taste. The commercial apple industry is satisfied with the few varieties that the Japanese breeders have created and it is a real shame that their desire for bigger profit margins on apple sales has created so much misinformation that has caught people like you.
Intelligent pruning takes care of that, and fruit production problems from young trees are not confined to non-grafted trees. A common cause in apples, at any rate, is overfertilization and overwatering. Life is just too easy for the young tree to put effort into reproduction. A good pruning session can sometimes trigger it, another technique is driving nails into the tree (NOT recommended) and another technique is driving a spade into the ground around the tree at the drip line, to cut some of the roots, this will often trigger fruiting.
Any good production fruit tree must be pruned to keep up production, AND harvested regularly! It is very damaging to leave ripe fruit on a fruit tree, it deforms and can break limbs and once the fruit is ripe, it will just suck more energy from the tree if it's left hanging.
they will all produce awful tasting apples, nothing like the ones from the parent tree.
a tree by the own-root system. Maybe they are bending the branches over into the soil to take root and form a new tree? Beats me. If so, I still see no advantage of this technique over grafting onto rootstocks. For someone who knows about rootstocks and grafting, there are no problems such as suggested in the articles.
This may work, but it is not the best way to propagate an apple tree. It works a lot better on things like house plants.
Now you are spouting garbage.
Pulling words out of context and twisting them around does not make your case more factual. Some apple developers plant thousands of seedlings with the hope that one of them may turn out usable. The smarter ones do selective breeding of apples over periods of years to come up with such apples as 'HoneySweet' from the U. of Minnesota. The point this reference is making that there may be a 'chance seedling' that could develop into something worthwhile and that certainly can happen, but not an everyday occurrence. You miss the words 'reliably reproduce' and that's where you miss the point. The
probability that the seedling would be exactly like the parent tree's apples is even much less likely, if not impossible. An apple seed does not act like a biological Zerox machine.
And many people who play the Lotto, hoping to make a killing.
You are trying to trivialize the whole subject. There is no 'free lunch' when it comes to finding new improved apple varieties.
Oh great. Instead of planting a dwarf tree, plant a full size tree and chop the hell out of it to make it into a dwarf.
I'm going to report you to the Society for the Protection of Trees.
This last paragraph is maybe the only thing that I can agree with.
Very untrue. If you don't believe me I'll be happy to provide some URLs. The topic comes up periodically on many garden sites and lots of people have reported that apple trees gotten this way produce edible and many times good tasting apples.
You are also not right that they will produce apples that are nothing like the parent tree. They will produce apples that are not exact copies of the parent tree, but contain elements of both parents.
Boy you are a lazy one! Are you unable to use a search engine? There's at least one company out there selling a kit that is a plastic ball you snap over a branch, you partly girdle the branch, apply root hormone, snap the plastic around it, then put water in it.
How do you -know- that grafting is better?
See the problem here is that commercial apple growers have been doing things the way they are doing them for so long that people just naturally assume that the way a commercial grower does it is the "right" way to propagate apple trees. But, this is only the "right" way if you goal is to create another commercial orchard filled with the same trees that all grow the same variety of apples so you can get as close to mechanical harvesting as possible and sell palletloads of the same apple variety - which is what the commercial fruit distributors want to buy.
This is usually quite different from what a home user wants who wants to grow a -single- tree. Sure - a grafted Gala or Golden Delicious may be perfectly satisfying to them - nonwithstanding they can get the same thing from the grocery store for less money and effort - but what if your Grandma living out in the country has a special apple tree that you ate apples from as a kid - and now you want to plant the same tree in your yard? God help you since the tree is almost certainly NOT going to be available from ANY commercial nursery. The only thing your going to be able to do is get rootstock and scionwood from Grandmas tree if it's still there. And suppose you try that and it doesen't work?
And in any case, even the commercial growers don't know that grafted trees are better - unless every once in a while someone tries doing it differently to see what happens. It's called a baseline comparison and it's regularly done in every other industry. The guy in the URL I cited living in the UK had a career out of growing trees and he feels own-root trees have some advantages and the subject was worth researching further.
Own-root isn't for me - but I think you are very closed minded if you would turn your back on it.
Ah, finally your admitting that there ARE people doing seedling apple trees.
But once more, and I will continually hammer on this since I kind of have some suspicions about your FUD, what an apple developer regards as usable is NOT necessarily what is "just edible"
Long storage life is probably the TOP trait that commercial apple developers breed for, followed by bruise resistance, then followed by color. Why - because these are the traits that attract shoppers in the grocery store.
Taste is WAY WAY down on the list. FAR LESS important than the other items.
The REAL truth is that apple developers plant thousands of seedlings and end up with many hundreds of apples that TASTE GOOD but do NOT have the long term storability that the industry demands. If a superior tasting apple comes along that only has a weeks shelf life, they might try breeding in longer shelf life, but it's going to go into the shitcan.
A century and a half ago there were thousands of apple varieties in the US that were commonly sold - not many of these contained the traits that fruit sellers want today. These came about from individual people seeding trees in their backyards.
"Honeycrisp" not "honeysweet" And I hardly call crossing Macoun with Honeygold to be particularly noteworthy. Once more, this is just another of the modern table varieties developed for long storage life - it is, in fact, the principle selling point of Honeycrisp - but poor cooking properties as you have to cook them far longer than other apples before they soften.
U of Minnesota gets a royalty on these which is another reason that the variety is so advertised. The University is out there banging the drum for it.
When people resort to straw men to try winning an arguement is is pitiful. I in no way stated or implied that grown-from-seed apples would be exactly like the parent tree's apples.
It depends on your definition of "improved" apple varities.
There's no free lunch when you want to have your cake and eat it too. The apple growers want an apple that will store forever, look fantastic, not need waxing, not need spraying, be resistant to every known apple tree disease, every known apple tree worm, be harvestable by gorillas who slam the fruit into the hoppper and load tons of fruit on top of each other, growing on trees that are all exactly identical,
and not be immediately spit out in disgust by a consumer biting into it.
Yes, there is no free lunch when that is what you want.
But for someone growing a few apple trees in their yard, well what do they want?
Perhaps what they want is to be able to walk out, pick some apples for dinner, or for baking a pie, and have the most fantastic tasting fruit they've every eaten in their lives. They don't care if a few of the apples on the tree might have worms, they don't care if the apples don't look all that great. They don't care if the apples aren't gigantic.
Or, maybe they really have no interest in cooking, and really just want a fruiting tree that attracts wildlife. (since animals will take what they can get and aren't too particular)
Ah, so all of our goals here are to grow dwarf trees? Where do YOU live, in some Suburb that has a neighborhood association that put deed restrictions into your home disallowing trees larger than
15 feet high?
You frankly sound like you have some personal gain to getting people to believe that there's no chance to grow an apple from seed and get anything usable out of it. I really wonder what. Perhaps your alma-mater is making a killing on royalties for apple trees.
Whatever it is, you are wrong in what your saying. Growing apples from seed is a viable method of getting a decent apple tree that produces good tasting apples. You generally can't do it from apples that come from the grocery store - since most commercial orchards use crabapple pollenators and a cross from a Gala (for example) and a crabapple very likely won't be any good - if the seeds are still viable after apple processing - or if the apple variety didn't have sterile seeds genetically engineered into it. (one of the many reasons the industry wants genetic enginnering) or if the apple didn't come from a self-fruit (like Golden Delicious which will self-fruit if there's no pollenators around)
But, you can definitely do it from apples that show up at local farmers markets that come from mom-and-pop orchards whith maybe 10-15 trees of different varieties, or heirloom apples (assuming you can find it) since these often come from the same kinds of orchards. Or from your neighbors single apple tree in his yard that he ignores most of the time. Sure, you have to be patient and take time to do it. Years of time. And your probably going to have to plant quite a few of them and expect to cut most of them down once they start fruiting. But, it's not as unreasonable as you are claiming, many people have done it. There's worse hobbies.
Ted, you're fighting a losing battle. Sherwin is absolutely determined to deter anyone and everyone from ever growing an apple from seed. It's his life's mission.
I reckon Sherwin just has a phobia about apple pips. He probably believes if he swallowed an apple pip it would get stuck in his appendix, start growing and kill him.
Actually, this is a recessive gene issue and the characteristics can go back further than the original tree.
Oh, you mean air-rooting. I have done that with a Plumeria once. Is this supposed to be easier than grafting? I can do and have done graphs in minutes. I also have the advantage of selecting the tree size by using the proper rootstock. With own-root systems, you get a full size standard tree, Ugh.
I just mentioned the size control issue. It's much less work.
These commercial growers are not as dumb or stubborn as you think. They have been moving quickly to dwarf trees because the maintenance and quick time to fruit production are superior to standard size trees.
The commercial growers want to grow something that will Reliably give them a good product. They leave it up to Universities and other people to come up with new varieties.
The solution to that is to take a piece of Grandma's tree (scion) and graft it onto your own rootstock. You make it sound like the selection of varieties is limited to the home grower. As a home grower, I have easy access to literally hundreds of different scion varieties. I don't have to waste my time trying to create something unusual when I have so many choices available.
You are a man of little faith. And what makes you think your Own-roots tree is going to work any more reliably?
As far as I'm concerned, this guy in the UK is a kook until proven otherwise. Don't underestimate the intelligence of the commercial growers. They are constantly checking for new proven varieties.
I also turn my back on UFO's. Seen any lately?
Yes, but they know what they are doing. You can't seriously expect a home owner to come even close to reproducing what they are doing.
My what?
It better be edible or he won't get any more business.
That is all changing. Have you been to your supermarket lately. You will see all kinds of new Japanese, New Zealand, U. of Minnesota, etc. apples in additon to the old standbys of Red Delicious and Granny Smith.
That was true at one time, but I think that changed some time ago.
With some exceptions, that is true. However, taste has become a bigger factor in what you see in the stores. That is the advantage of home growers like myself who can grow perishable and ugly fruit to get the top taste. It
doesn't always work for the commercial growers.
Again, your facts are wrong. Most of these seedlings grown by pioneers, etc. were not very good for eating and were mostly used for cider. Since fresh water and fruit was sometimes a problem for them in the Winter, they relied on the cider. Grafting goes way back to the Roman times. They knew the advantages of grafting and that was carried on to the present day.
Have you tasted a Honeycrisp. I would imagine not. They sell for three times the price of other apples because of their superior taste and crispness.
There are plenty of other apple varieties suitable for cooking.
And they deserve it. I grow a Honeycrisp in my yard and look forward to those apples every year.
I think those are admirable desires, but they know they have to spray their trees to keep them clean. The consumer wants to know what they are buying. Stores will not experiment with unknown apples until you convince them that they will sell.
I grow 15 different apples in my yard. I think they are among the best tasting ones available and most of them cannot be bought in a store. I keep the worms out as best I can and can get nice large apples with proper thinning. I don't care what apples are being sold in the stores because I have everything I want in my back yard.
I have plenty of varieties for cooking.
I control the animals too.
No, I can grow any height. I don't need 20 foot or higher trees that can't be reached without a tall ladder that could kill me if I fall off. Spraying and pruning these high monsters. Forget it.
No, I don't like people like you encouraging people to grow apples from seed, put years of labor into caring for it, and then discovering that the apples it produces are spitters.
Baloney.
I am a self-starter and like to do projects myself, but when it comes to developing new apple varieties, I leave it up to the people with the resources.
Maybe a few thousand.
What a horrible waste of time. If you were talking peaches, I may agree a bit more with you, since they propagate closer to the parent from seed.
I didn't send Ted off anywhere, Sherwin, it's amazing - you think we all think together, yet all of us are independent thinkers who came to the same conclusion about you.
Just an observation Sherwin, do you notice how often you use the word "I"? Compare the number of times that you use "I" with that of Ted's. (It's about four times more.) It's a freakish thought that you may really know something but it seems that you have a way of standing in front of your information and thus obscuring it.
If you can present your information without inserting yourself into it so much, I think you would get a better reception.
Billy wrote:Just an observation Sherwin, do you notice how often you use the word
First of all, I am not trying to win any popularity contest here. I'm just presenting the facts as I see them.
Sure I use 'I' frequently because I'm speaking from over 20 years experience in growing fruit trees, belonging to several fruit growing organizations, and years of visiting orchards and researching fruit growing topics. I don't look for obscure web sites who quote kooky theories designed for misinformation. If that bothers you, well I'm sorry for that. Why is it freakish that I may really know something? Some people on this forum like to put things on a personal basis, if there is any disagreement with their ideas. Anyone unfortunate enough to get type cast as an undesirable gets labeled as a trouble maker and non- believer. These comments degrade the discussions to the level of the school playground and unfortunately they are among the most vocal on this forum. I will continue to insert my own experiences into these discussions as they represent more solid information to me than all these weirdos dug up on the web. I am not trying to toot my own horn, but if I have extensive experience in a certain area of gardening, why shouldn't I speak of my experiences?
Not only was his replies too long, his links did not work. Yours did, and I find the comparison of my emails to the one referenced, a big stretch. When people do not have a substancial basis for an arguement, they start to look for other things to attack. It's probably some form of prejudice or ignorance.
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