Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Raising fruit trees from seed?

The apple tree thread has me wondering.. Anyone raise fruit trees from seed?

Grafting is the way to replicate a specific variety of many species in a predictable way due to cross pollination. Saves you a little time also versus starting from a seed.

John Chapman got his nickname planting mostly seeds (I believe) which would have resulted in a random type of apple that loosely reflected its parentage.

You can but you might not know what pollinated it and end up with a crappy apple after caring for it for years. Better to buy a known tree and type of apple you want from a reputable nursery.

It'd be more hobby, it'd take a long time before any apples..

There are so many hybrids and grafted trees I would think most of the seeds are sterile. You could plant the seed but never even get a tree to sprout. I did this with some peach pits this last year and got nothing. Pretty much what I expected but I had to try. I'll just go to Stark Bros. or Fleet and Farm to get my trees.

kwg

one of my orange trees grew from a seed taken from a tree at my son's place. Took awhile, many years, but it produces great fruit

We had a small lemon on a tree from seed.

Growing fruit trees from seed is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get!

I propagate hundreds (if not a thousand) fruit trees and bushes every year.

Seed is one method... but generally not my preference.

Hybrids don't breed true. Most likely you'll get a tree from one of the parents and some of those are pretty bad. Plant breeding is very technical and takes a lot of training. Don't waste your time. By the time you find out that the fruit is useless, you could be eating quality fruit from a nursery.

Chapman was an itinerate preacher who wandered all over the place. He'd go to cider presses and collect seeds that he scattered along the way on his travels. He had hopes of some of them providing apples for future travelers to eat along their way. Some were pretty bad as he had no idea what kind he was planting. They were often crossbred and a waste of time to grow.

I think if Wabi dug a ditch... and crawled in it with a bunch of his favorite seeds...

Had Gilbert bury the seeds...

We would all rejoice...

Be fruitful Wabi!

Be fruitful...

Don’t they all come from seeds

Originally, yes. But ALL current apple production is from clones of each and every hybrid grown commercially. In the old days folks would often have an orchard for cider production. Just random trees from where ever.

There is a large Russian forest dominated by wild apples. No two trees are the same.

Oh wow

Not intentionally

If you and your bride want figs... I'll bring you some next summer...

Very least... they are great for wildlife.

FIL has several just reminded me

Sitka Deer;
Good afternoon sir, I hope that the day behaved thus far for you and your fine family.

Thanks for the interesting tidbit about the forest of wild apples, I'd not heard of that before but it's not surprising.

Somewhere I read something to the effect that most if not all of Johnny Appleseed's orchards were cider apples. If I'm not wrong, a whole lot of the varieties were lost as well when Prohibition came in as there was a concerted effort to eradicate said cider trees because of the demon alcohol they produced.

We had a volunteer tree in our yard that produced the nicest apples, which unfortunately had to be taken out when we did a major renovation.

Now you could ask me if I grabbed some buds from it and grafted them onto the Granny Smith tree in the yard, you know like someone with even a minute amount of forethought would have done.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't ask me that Sitka, but you could.....

When we had horses still and I used to roam the mountain behind the house via Appaloosa power, there were a few volunteer trees that we found over the years that she loved to stop at.

Honestly looking back at it now, she likely smelled them and steered me over towards the wild apples and since I was hunting mostly and not paying attention always to where she wandered.

Interestingly apples, apricots and plums are the only wild or maybe feral fruit trees we find in the hills, never a cherry, peach or nectarine tree.

Most of the apple trees in the orchards here are grafted root stock which I'm told are more disease resistant, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not.

Thanks again and all the best to you all.

Dwayne

You might try Stark Brothers.

Yepp...

Hard to beat them on pears or blueberries... especially if you don't have rockstar propagation stock.

Cherry trees are easy

My son planted an apple core when he was 3.

I have dug up and transplanted the resulting tree twice now.

It is near the well/pump and I don’t want the roots to destroy the well.

Another nice sapling will be dug up soon :sigh:

My son is 23 now.

This has gotta be the only Apple core that a kid buried that lived

Dwayne
I hope your weather is better than ours! Three days of rain on top of the snowiest November on record is creating a massive literal luge!

My grandfather was very big on apples. His favorite had 26 varieties grafted to a fair-sized tree. In the fall the different varieties would start expressing themselves all around the tree. But the other thing he grafted to the tree was a huge variety of sizes, colors, forms, etc. of roses. Some bloomed throughout the growing season.

The year he died his apple tree did too. Completely unexpected.

All the best to you Dwayne!

So are peaches, there’s one that produces nice fruit in the back yard that grew from a pit in the compost pile.

The hard part is recognizing what they are when only 5 or 6 inches tall before running them over with the mower, weed wacking them or pulling the sprouts as weeds. Once identified put a piece of wire around them to discourage the rabbits.

At my age, I’d rather spend more and buy/plant a good size tree. Don’t want to waste the years I have left in wait.

Just for fun, not fruit, and tropical, so not viable except as houseplants, are the mango and tangerine trees, bushes really, that my wife started from seeds from grocery store fruit. The tangerine is getting pretty big, which makes dragging it in and out of the garage to keep it from freezing. I need to get something to put under it to protect the floors in the house and just bring it in for the Winter.

I planted around 200 seeds in starter pots this Spring. I got 5 to sprout and transplanted them in the raised bed for a few years. I have one tree that came from a seed I planted that is now 20 feet or so tall. It is surrounded by other apple trees yet that one has never blossomed or produced any fruit. The seed came from a fruit basket someone gave us when my Dad was in the hospital after a heart attack. If it weren't for that, the tree would have been cut down and replaced years ago.

Are there any apples that grow true to seed?

How to Grow an Apple Tree From Seed
Apples do not reproduce true to type, meaning that the tree grown from a specific variety of seed will produce apples almost certain to be different than the parent. You can have fun and experiment, but don't expect to have the same fruit. Also, almost all varieties are unable to pollinate themselves

Persimmons are good easy to grow don’t eat a green one 🤢

Chapman was a wandering preacher who covered lots of miles on foot and though it would be great if travelers could have apples to eat along the way. He went to cider presses and collected seeds that he planted wherever he went. Most of them were poor quality, usable for cider but not much for eating.
25 or 30 years ago, Stark Bros was selling starts from what they claimed was the only remaining living tree that could be documented as having been planted by Chapman himself. My wife was teaching 4th grade in a Christian school and they covered Chapman's history. She got one of the trees for a lesson for the kids and we grew it. The tree was very prolific but the apples were terrible. They were very large and flat and very bitter. They were useless for fresh juice or eating but they might have made passable hard cider if fermented.

Did Jonny Appleseed really wear a pot on his head?

Persimmons are like naggers. They send out shoots all around the perimeter of the parent. One tree can start a grove. RZ.

Apples have to be cross pollinated to produce fruit. That means that the pollen comes from a different tree. Breeders do a lot of work to develop a new variety and they cross 2 specific parents to get the right traits. The odds of getting the same thing from a random breeding is zero or less. Once a new variety is finished, all propagation is from cuttings as breeding from seeds is a crap shoot, even for the experts.
If you want to grow one from seed, don't bother. Grow it by rooting a cutting or better yet, graft it to another root stock.

You don’t have that much time.

Amen...

My neighbor which was a cheery grower, grew his cherrie trees from a test tube. The only thing I remember was he cracked open the pit. He developed his on varieties.

Kinda the same with peach pits...

Crack 8-10 in a vise... put in a pot or soil/perlite/vermiculite... grown then until they are root bound... plant... wait a year in soil... then kill 7-9 of them.

So far, I have started black walnut, native pecan and burr oak from the nut.
I've never had any luck starting or growing fruit trees! 😖

The black walnut and one of the pecan trees are bearing nuts.
Per "Google", it takes the burr oak THIRTY FIVE YEARS to produce acorns!!!!! (I'll be 105 years old! LOL!)

BTW! Anybody here got any "chink-a-pin" acorns they are willing to share?

I would guess it was the base root stock the tree grew into.

I should stay with what I know, and let the tree growers grow trees?

It'll take 8 to 10 years to find out if your trees are usable. Then you can start over if they aren't. How many decades do you have left to grow trees? Or, you can buy good stock and be eating good apples after only 5 years.

Exactly.
The only way to know what you are getting is grafting.

My father planted a bunch of mulberry trees from seed. They were a specific color that he liked. I wage war on them in my fence lines.

I planted about 200 apple seeds in a 5 gl bucket last winter. Pulled bucket out too late and had about 200 5" long extremely spindly sprouts this spring that broke at the slughtest touch. All but one died. Trying again this year. Idea was to just plant them to deer forage in a few years; but not sure it is worth it.

The seeds were from some trees we purchased that are now yielding. In all candor, probably ahead to just buy small disease resistant trees cheap from some reputable source. May cost more initially; but much more likely to have favorable results.

I've got some cherry trees that came up in a garden bed, from seed I tossed there. I should have tried to transplant one or two this past season while they were dormant.

Couple of plum trees about 1' tall in another bed too. Hope to get them dug up in early spring when I can use my arm again.

i'm not worried about what they produce. If anything, there's always jelly that can b made.

Wild apples are that way too. All over farm land in E WA, deer eat apples, scheidt in the bar ditch, new apple tree. every once in awhile they find a good tasting new variety from seed and clone the heck out of it.

What we call an apple was developed by breeding the European crab apple with a Kazakh species of apple and a Chinese species of apple. The "apple" therefore didn't exist before Marco Polo's time -- there was no "apple" in the garden of Eden.

Because of that mixture of three HUGELY variable species, breeding any two varieties of appple will give WILDLY variable results. In essence, every breeding is an outcross. Many offspring will revert back to one of the parent type, e.g. crab apple.

I bought an apple, and a peach tree from Chief River.

Dang bro,you ruined a good garden story there. What next, no serpents either?

As to the potential crosses today, what you say makes sense. Some of the ones I've found growing wild (feral?) aren't worth picking for cider even.

Some things we do just fore the fun of it

So, the Old Testament was written post-1295?

I’ve started many teees from seed

Chinese chestnut
Various apple
Deer pears
Sawtooth, red and white oak.

I’ve planted approx 200 trees in 6 years some have died. Some are doing ok, some aren’t doing much and some are thriving. It’s a hobby..

I started in 2019, so far the only one to bear has been one of the Chinese chestnut trees. They seem to be doing the best. Most are 10feet tall.

I’ve also bought seedlings and trees oaks, Dunstan chestnut, Norway spruce, some pear, apples, persimmon, and Allegheny chinkapin.

It’s a hobby. I may never see some of them bear in my lifetime, but if by chance I get lucky and they all do bear…. It will be a great hunting season lol!

No, your translator sucks, lol..

Came across this article today. Pretty cool what this fella does with heirloom apples.
Appalachian Apple hunter

There was an article in our electric co-op magazine about a guy in OR trying to find and save old varieties.

Small program by some folks in our county doing similar, taking scions to graft to try to keep the strain going.

If you can find any mention of apples anywhere in the Bible, please let us know where. They most certainly weren't in the Garden of Eden.