year of the seedling

[glenn10]

I have some seedling plums into their first good fruition, seeds were planted in fall 2008. previous 2 years set was very sparse. This year they are loaded! And yes I even have a tree growing inside a turkey pen!

[jondear]

In this thread alanbishop.proboards.com/post/new/8097 I got all kinds of ideas of growing peaches here in Maine.

Fast forward a year, and I have met a guy who has, as he described it, "the most productive peach in town". Granted, he's about 100 miles south of me, on the coast, but they're about as local as I'm likely to get. I asked if he'd mind if I collected some pits from drops to try and grow trees. He told me he'd give me a box full of 1st quality peaches to try. I'm pretty stoked to get a chance to try it 😎


Sorry about the link-fail... I never said I was tech savvy.

[billw]

The yellow one looks very appealing.

[castanea]

Awesome.

I just had another person in a fruit and garden group tell me not to grow seedling apples. I really think some of these people don't know where all the named varieties came from.

[steev]

Well, some people haven't the space nor time to play, let alone the sense to find their butts with both hands.

The Bay Area is full of "Bird/Chinese" plum trees, most of which are mediocre, at best; good for nothing but "crack-seed", which is tasty, but kind of irrelevant to fruit quality; every so often, though, one finds a real winner. Isn't genetic variability a wonder!

[glenn10]

I have a lot of seedling trees. out of a shit ton of plum trees I have 2 really good ones(pictured yellow and black) the rest are meh to yuck LOL. Those trees are not wasted though as they provide pollen and If i wish I can graft them over to something more palatable which I have done with several already.I do the same with apple and pear.I have seedling sweet cherry that are pretty good as well but I have not had any luck with the few grafting attempts on them.
I have over the many years spent whole wads of money on box store trees and even more expensive mail order stuff only to see them grow the summer and then die the following spring I assume from many variables of winter.That is what led me to try planting seeds and survival of the strongest.
If you have a good chunk of property to play with and you are old enough to see them come into fruition(or you could just plant for future generations GO for it! if it is a winner enjoy it, if not graft over it and enjoy it!

[glenn10]

jondear, Here are my seedling peach trees. Out of a shit ton of peach over the years only 3 survived. If we get a fairly good winter we get peaches!I spent way too much money and dug way too many holes year after year chasing that home grown peach. All I had to do was buy container after container of somewhat local(Ontario has similar climate)peaches, force my wife to eat like 10 peaches a day and save the pits, plant pits in the fall and wait 3-4 years

[prairiegarden]

Do you do anything with the pits between the time of eating the fruit and planting the seed? So far I've had no luck getting stone fruit pits to germinate at all.

[philip]

I have a friend who throws all her pips and other fruit seeds into her compost pile. She then gets loads of seedling trees on a regular basis that she just pulls out of her compost

[glenn10]

Prairiegarden, we save them bulk in a rancid fermented plastic baggie on one of the shelves in the kitchen Basically they need "chill hours" to break dormancy depending on what it is it may need a few hundred to over a thousand. I used to put the baggies in the fridge and usually around Christmas time they would start germinating. I would pot them and they would grow like crazy then when spring came around i would try and harden them off too quickly and would lose a lot of them. now I just till up a spot in the fall shove the pits in the ground and wait for spring(sometimes it takes 2 years for some to germinate).

Glenn

[prairiegarden]

ahhhhh then I may have been tossing them out too quickly.. I put them in containers outside and left them there all winter expecting to see at least some germinate and when none did I tossed them. Drat. Will try again then. Thanks Glenn

[glenn10]

Prairiegarden, I should mention too not to let the pits get dry. It seems a dry pit is a dead pit from my trials. I have not subjected them to hard freezing either so it would be a safer bet to bury them so they have the soil to insulate.

Glenn

[prairiegarden]

They're going to have to cope with hard freezes at some point in time, this is zone 3 at best or so I'm told. Maybe I'll stash them in a pot buried in vermiculite in an unheated greenhouse, and try to keep the mice from getting at them. The others were in soil but I didn't pay a lot of attention..or any, tbh, about keeping the soil moist. This lot, will try to be more conscientious. Thanks for the tips.

[glenn10]

Family has been really busy eating all these plums and peaches so now we are all plummed and peached out.Trying to preserve as much as we can.Made 40 pounds of canned peaches, some we peeled but that was too labor intensive so we left the peels on the rest and it made the syrup a nice pink color.We burned the pot of first pot black plum jam but we are trying yellow plum jam take two tonight!

[steev]

With such a bounty of small plums, I'm thinking Slivovitz.