[St. Phatty]

I save a lot of my food seeds, and got about 10 apple trees started.

I hear that the store-bought grafted kind are better, something about seed-grown yielding mushy fruit ?

Anyway, I was going to grow them under lights & on the window-sill during the winter, then move them to selected growing areas.

I'd be happy to mix in store-bought fruit trees.


Have any ICMag members experimented with this - seed-grown apple trees vs. store-bought & grafted ?


Mushy fruit can still come in handy, for compost. If these seedlings are destined to make mushy fruit, I might plant them so they're right uphill from a compost pile.

[aridbud]

Have grown apricots from pit, not apple. Took several years, 8 if
I recall, to bear fruit. Depends on how long you want to wait to get an apple.

[Lester Beans]

There are many reasons grafted trees work better than seed. Health, vigor, yield, quality of fruit, etc.

Of course if you have the time you can grow them out and see. If you are looking to harvest fruit, go with grafted trees.

[exploziv]

If you want to plant apple trees from seed, plant lots of them, to be able to select the ones you like once they eventually start bearing fruits. Good thing with seed planted apple (and other) fruit trees is that they make a good root system for grafting a nice selected fruit bearing variety on them. That way you can get fruits faster, too.

[Gry]

sounds like what I once heard from a guy who cared for grapefruit trees

[corky1968]

They will grow from seed. But will take a very long time to bear fruit.

Reasons why it's not worth the trouble.

The majority of fruit trees that supply apples for the food market are on rootstocks from another tree that causes
some dwarfing to occur. This helps in the management of the trees and lessens the time for a harvest to occur.

An apple tree from a seed would be what they call a standard rootstock and that tree could be 40' tall and
take 10+ years to produce it's first apples. With an apple tree purchased from a nursery that's grafted onto
a dwarfing rootstock. You could have an apple as early as the following year.

The other thing is that apples are normally cross pollinated. So even though the apple tasted good it doesn't mean
the seeds you have will produce the same. Considering how long it will take to find out. Most people don't bother.

Check this link out for more info with emphasis on the Apple rootstocks section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit tree propagation

I'm sure you'll see why it's better to buy a nursery tree with a known apple variety grafted onto a rootstock
that is not going to produce a 40' tree and take a decade or longer to produce an unknown quality apple.

I've looked into this before and figure you should know the truth.

You could always start the seeds and plant them in a forest and check on them in a decade.
I bet the animals like deer would like fresh apples should the trees grow.

[Chunkypigs]

I have acres of wild Apple trees, 50+ Examples and they are very ineteresting. For miles on my road there are wild old apples growing. If you want juice or hard cider they are great. Many that are too tart to eat out of hand make great pies and jam. They are all more interesting than what you find at the market. The ones that have made it seem pretty disease resistant but they don't yeild like grafted commercial trees.

Just like with weed I'd rather have taste over yeild.

[OranguTrump]

I've grown lemon trees from seed - they only got to be about 3 or 4 feet tall, but they were indoor plants. The smell from the leaves when you rubbed them was heaven.

[MicroRoy]

I have a peach tree. I was eating a peach on my way to the mail box. I spit the peach across the road. It's about 15 years old.

The bloom and frost times don't jive. So we have seen it bloom five times. But only seen fruit twice.


The fruit was about hens egg sized not real sweet or juicy. But tastes nice.


With the fruit being small it makes lots of fruit. There are about 20 trees now. On either side of the road. I think the critters spread them around some.

The first tree is over 30' might be 40'.

[Green Squall]

I've grown an avocado pit for a house plant before. They don't do well in my region. I just did it for fun. This is how you germinate them.