Seed grown fruit trees

[LaurenRitz]

General rule with many plants is that you should end up with something in between the two parents. Normally if you cross two good peaches you should get a decent peach. Crossing across species barriers gets much more complicated.

For example, the peach-leafed almond mentioned above has a female parent which is edible pit but no fruit, and one which had good fruit and a toxic pit. So I could end up with edible pit and good fruit, but chances are high that the pit will be mildly toxic and the fruit minimal.

Between two trees that have good fruit, your odds of getting something good are high. The flavor might surprise you, though.

 

[flowerbug]

Anything that was grown in your local area has a better chance of thriving if planted from a seed.

other considerations are that young trees just do not have that large of a root system yet so they may not survive until they are more well established and have a deeper and larger root system. that is why with young trees you do want them to be regularly watered deeply enough in their first year or two.

and also, with some plants their genetics can be much more complicated than either/or traits as blending can happen and some plants have multiple sets of genes so then it can be even more complicated (apples are a good example for those who think this stuff should be simple, it's isn't...).

and this isn't a way of saying that people shouldn't try, but also to just be aware that you may have interesting results which don't meet your expectations.

 

[LaurenRitz]

My process is basically shotgun-STUN. Plant any seeds I can get my hands on, let them fight it out. The 5 apricots and 5 peaches are the survivors. I planted dozens of seeds for each, and many died. Most died either on transplant or during their first summer.

By not coddling them, I now have trees that will likely survive anything my environment can throw at them. If they don't produce good fruit, I'll have rootstock that thrives in heavy clay, spring floods, cold winters and summer drought.

I had no survivors from the almonds, cherries and plums, because of my failure in choice of location. I wasn't aware that all the water drained to that area, so during spring rains they sat in a puddle for weeks and drowned. The water drained downhill from the peaches, apples and apricots. A matter of only a few inches, but it made a difference.

Trying again next spring, in a different area.

I planted the seedlings as little as a foot apart and after losses I ended up with 5 - 10 foot spacing. If you're dealing with a preferred cultivar that process is impossible. The rootstocks of grafted trees won't take that level of neglect.

 

[Mini Horses]

Not only are those survivors stronger for you, they often are more resistance to many pests & worry.

 

[flowerbug]

some years ago i planted an 8ft row of apple seeds from mixed apples that were given to us to make apple sauce. several hundred seeds all planted very closely together. it was an interesting experiment, had many that grew and some that were interesting but my original plan of planting those out back beyond the large drainage ditch didn't pan out and they were getting 5-8ft tall in their third year and i cut them all off at the ground level. the next spring most of them sprouted again and wanted to keep growing but by the end of that summer i had to dig them out of there. it was a lot of work.

i thought it would be interesting if i ever needed a living fence/hedge to do that again but the young trees/hedge/fence would still need to be protected from the deer eating them back to nothing until they grew taller than the deer grazing height.

 

[LaurenRitz]

I planted a peach tree hedge at my old house. It just had its first blossoms when I sold the house.

 

[LaurenRitz]

All the fruit trees have gone dormant. All 5 peaches survived the summer. All 5 2nd year apricots also survived. 2 almond seedlings and an apricot seedling survived in the dry garden; clay soil, no mulch, watered only once. We'll see if they survive the winter.

I have plums, Nanking cherries and grape seeds in the refrigerator. Almonds sprout within a couple weeks so they'll go in late January. Pecans and oak seeds will be planted straight in the ground.