some apple seedling experiments

[swaine]

increasing my fruit collection from soft fruits and planted a small orchard of apples and plums, cherries, apricots,

ive planted about 30 types of apple and have tried my hand at buying scions and grafting, I couldn't resist as with my soft fruit, growing out some seedlings to see what pops out,

out of the seedlings I especially like the ones with the dark red leaves hopefully will remain this colour, when ive improved my grafting a bit ill try some grafts of these to see what the apples are like,
stew

[boundtothesoil]

out of the seedlings I especially like the ones with the dark red leaves hopefully will remain this colour, when ive improved my grafting a bit ill try some grafts of these to see what the apples are like,
stew

Good luck with these seedlings. I guess you know what the female parent varieties are, but not the male parents. In which case they are the result of 'open crosses' (father unknown). If the father was a crab apple, the chances of the seedlings producing a decent eating apple are fairly low.

You need to grow the seedlings as tall as possible, in order to pass through the juvenile phase of development, during which they will not flower. The scientific literature talks of the necessity to produce 70 internodes (gap between successive leaves up the main stem) in order to be able to flower, and over 120 internodes to 'have' to definitely flower. I grow a lot of seedlings from defined crosses and, outside,, under my soil conditions they produce on average around 45 internodes per year, so it's a fairly long business. A few of my seedlings have flowered during the fourth year of growth after making the crosses

[swaine]

thanks for the interesting and informative advice, very valuable stew