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RE: How to Grow Your Own Apple Trees From Seeds
Very nice! It will be interesting to see the variety of different apples your seedlings produce. Coming from a Gala, they have some good genetics. But apple seeds don't have the same genetic mix as their parents. By planting a lot of them, you increase your chances of getting something worth keeping. And even if some trees don't produce quality apples, they may still make good rootstock that works well in your soils and climate. The nice thing is that no effort is lost -- you can graft cuttings from your best trees onto the rootstock of the types that aren't such good producers, so your time investment still has a payoff. And your trick of bending branches down has really worked well for me. Happy apple growing!
Very important reminder. Johnny Appleseed planted the now world famous American grafted strains not by purpose, but because any and all apples could be used for making apple cider... ;)
@id-entity thank you for sharing that.
I plan to have mine fresh and if they happen to bear a great lot, I'd be sharing them with friends or making apple cider or juice out of them.
That's a good reminder! I've never run across any "bad" apple, really. But I have come across a lot of apples that struggle with disease. Disease resistance has become a big factor in my choice of what apples I keep growing - and one that Johnny didn't have to deal with. Apples did so well in those early days of European settlement, because the apple diseases just weren't here --- yet. They eventually got here and then there was some real hardship, because folks weren't prepared.
Johnny was Masanobu Fukuoka kind of guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka
Appletrees grown from seed are naturally more resistant and adaptive than the clone combos. A teacher in the gardening school where I hanged around for a while was also very much into seed growing appletrees.
PS: If you are into a very old/very new age trick, they say that if you hold the seed for a while in your mouth befofe planting, the fruits of the plant friend will share the information field of your body and become personally designed health food. Hereabouts the traditional way to sow e.g. rye and barley was to spit it. :)
I guess he was, at that!
@haphazard-hstead
cheers! grafting would definitely be useful!
@opheliafu as what @haphazard-hstead wrote - you could graft a stem of your fruiting apple to that of the one that is not fruiting yet or you could trick it that it is already fruiting by stretching its branches horizontally. Just make sure that there is just one stem leader on top and that the tree have at least a maximum of 8 main branches since they are still considerably young. Cheers to all the apple growers :)