Apple seeds and seedlings

[thehermit1000]

When I first started growing apples, I decided to see if I could find enough roadside seedling apples to start an orchard. In a few years I had tasted about 400 fencerow apples and found 20 worth grafting.

I recently made a website hopeing to connect with other people who are interested in apples and other fruit from seed. seedlingapples.wordpress.com/ If you have grafted a good seedling or just know of good seedlings growing near you, please contact me.

I would like to help people get their seedling discoveries recognized and prevent them from being lost. My goal is to start a test orchard for seedling apples. At this point, I'm not sure how to proceed to get more people involved. I'm disabled and can't grow fruit trees anymore. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

I also would like to see more people tasting "wild" apples. It's a lot of fun, and you may find apples adapted to your locality. Two useful traits that come to mind are fireblight and scab resistance. A group of people in Maine go looking for superior seedling apples and get together at the MOFGA Fall Fruit Show and taste their discoveries to determine which ones are worth grafting.

Some people have expressed an interest in obtaining apple seeds. If you can send me some seeds of your favorite apples and pears, I'll list them on my website for people who want them. One apple I'm particullarly interested in obtaining seeds of is Goldrush. I know apples seeds don't come true from seed. But many people enjoy expermenting.

Hermit

[raymondo]

Not helpful for your project given the distance but there are a number of good seedling apples in the area where I live. Most are roadside trees so I guess they grew from apple cores tossed out of passing cars. I hadn't thought of bringing any home to graft until I read your post. Might give it a go.
Good luck with your venture.

[rowan]

I have been going to evaluate all the local roadside apples for the past couple of years but the parrots strip the trees before they are ripe so I don't think it wall happen. Oh well, I have had some delicious feral apples over the years.

[richardw]

About 1/4 the trees in my orchard are the best of roadside trees,there's literally 100's of them and even the amount of 1-2 year old trees ive noticed lately is amazing,even pears/plums and Apricot grow on the sides of our roads and yet every few people ever think to stop and pick them,there's a mind set that if they dont come from a supermarket they are no good.
Ive noticed about the % of trees too Hermit,i reckon about one in twenty is a nice eater.

[steev]

Well, really, guys; if it isn't officially sanctioned, it's got to be bad; don't you think?

I mean, if it were any good, wouldn't some Big Ag corporation have claimed it (or developed it)? Surely you don't think Nature can randomly produce results of any worth; how do you think we got here, by natural selection? God forbid!

[MikeH]

We find that many seedling apples are tart/sweet. They're edible but nothing to get excited about. Quite suitable for baking and cider.

[richardw]

Don't agree Mike,ive got two roadside trees that are as nice as anything you would buy from the shop,ones a yellow ,the other a red skin and both lovely sweet,some of my other roadside trees that ive got growing here are here for reasons of they dont get black spot but are still ok'ish for eating also.

[richardw]

This was a roadside find treecropsresearch.org/montys-surprise/ a very nice eating apple

[steev]

An apple a day keeps the oncologist away.

[MikeH]

Assuming that roadside apples were selected apples tossed out the window of a passing car, it's likely that the parents were keepers too. The ones we've come across are far from the road and so not likely to have notable parents. They're still pretty good though. Honeycrisp's parents were thought to be Macoun and Honeygold but DNA testing says otherwise - hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/40/1/15.full.pdf

[nicollas]

Damn this Monty Surprise apple is too cool to stay out of Europe :/

[richardw]

This first photo is a sucker grown tree which grows a red skinned apple,the original tree grew a mid sized fruit where it grows on the side of the road so it will be interesting to see if they grow larger in my orchard because they will get lots more water.
Its its first time fruit since been moved to here with 4 apples at the top.



This one is a sucker off a yellow fruited apple tree,i managed to get a sucker from it thanks to a farmer who had cut it down a few years earlier because it was by a gateway,now its sending shoots out all over the place.



These three trees are a yellow apple,mid way between sweet and tart,an ok eating apple but i got these mainly because they grow very clean skin fruit,no black spot at all.



This tree is a real beauty,its not a road side apple but a seedling that grew from my dads compost heap,its a Granny Smith something cross,it looks like a Granny but has more red skin,has a small amount of sweetness that makes it a dam good eating apple but its real worth is the amount of fruit its grows,every second year it grows truck loads with a lighter crop every other year.

[raymondo]

Your sucker and seed grown trees look good Richard.

There's a chap in the UK, Phil Corbett, growing apples (and other things) on their own roots so he can coppice them and know that he will get back the same variety of whatever when they regrow. He coppices two neighbouring rows and grows vegies in the alley between until the trees get too big again. He then moves to another pair of rows, not immediately adjacent.

[richardw]

Thanks Ray,only one tree out of the 30 are on root stock,and that one had two types on it,a Coxs Orange and a Braeburn,during this winter i ended up cutting off the Braeburn as its a horrible disease prone apple.
Interesting way Phil Corbett does it Ray,i know that if i were to garden in between the rows of trees that the soil has improved so much over the years because of the amount of green matter thats been grown there.

[steev]

I grow between tree-rows for shade and wind-shelter. It also is coming to seem useful especially since peppers mostly seem to do poorly in direct sun for me.

Now that my trees are largely established, I no longer irrigate them directly, only the planting lanes between, of row-crops. Plums seem to be a problem of root-suckers in the planting lanes, but otherwise, so far, so good.

This being the season when much is winding down, I'm pleased with the leaves being dropped from my trees into my planting lanes, which I will till in as soon as it rains. I don't worry about the tree's feeder roots that I chop up with the tiller, since the trees have the very heavily mulched/composted lanes between them for their feeder roots, which I never till, only throw the slash/waste from the planting lanes to compost at Nature's speed.