Once seedlings have grown to a decent size and seem ready to transplant, I put them in the ground. I would prefer to put them on about 8 to 12 inch spacing in the rows, with rows a foot or more apart, but that can take up a lot of space. I’ve planted as close as 5 inches apart in every direction, in blocks, but some slower growing seedlings get overshadowed by the more vigorous trees and can become stunted. If planted out early and well cared for, they can make a lot of growth in one season and the more the better.
One could put them into large pots instead of the ground. Just make sure they are getting very regular food and water. It is easy to stunt a tree in a pot.
In the beginning, I used to grow seedlings for one year, and then graft a long section of the seedling onto a dwarfing rootstock in the spring. I’ve grafted scions over two feet long, basically grafting almost all the growth that was made in the first year. What I observed is that the early growth of the plant is juvenile and fruit usually forms at the top of a seedling tree first. This juvenile growth is basically worthless, so I ended up with a long stem of useless non-fruiting wood. Others have made this same observation. I was told early on to grow the seedling out as fast as possible, very tall, then take just the tip to graft out. I think that is good advice and it is what I’m doing now.
My approach now is going to be to grow the seedling trees on their own roots up to 6 or more feet tall, then take the very tip to graft onto dwarf stock. I have a feeling this will work better and apparently it is what a lot of breeders do. In my case, this will probably take two years of growing seedlings on their own roots. Under better conditions, with an early start on fertile soil, lots of fertilizer, very regular, timed watering and reasonably large spacings between trees, that time might be reduced to a year. One thing that will help with this is getting the earliest start possible. Stratifying and planting early and growing under lights in a greenhouse if possible could really help that along, so that good sized plants are ready to go in the ground when the weather is warming up. Using larger starting pots could help with that as well. I would consider using a pot larger than the 2-3/8” x 5” I’m using now, but that will only be useful if I can start early enough and get very fast early growth somehow.
It is supposed by many that grafting to dwarfing stocks will make seedlings fruit more quickly. I’m not convinced that is true yet, but will probably continue to do it, because it seems likely. There are those that say growing trees on their own roots will give more typical fruits of better quality than those grafted onto dwarfing stock, or any stocks at all. I suspect that fruiting will take much longer though and the trees would be expected to be larger and require larger spacing. I might experiment with that in the future, doing rows of each to see how quickly they fruit etc. For now, I’m likely to stick with dwarfing stock in closely spaced rows. If I can get good land with plenty of water, I may plant them a little further apart. My original trial rows were planted just 12 inches apart with the rows 6 feet apart. That works but I would not plant any closer than 12 inches and 18 inches seems much better if room is available. If you do the math though, you’ll find that the extra 6 inches per tree will translate into a lot more space.
I have used multiple dwarfing stocks and don’t have a strong preference. I like working with BUD9 and would choose that over M9. I’ve also used some Geneva stocks, but they had poor roots. I’m now using BUD10, which has excellent roots. It is bigger than BUD9, which may be good or bad, we’ll see. The BUD10 trees make excellent rapid growth so far.
If at all possible, trellis the trees up to wires. A simple way to do this is to pound a tall, strong Tee fence post at either end of the row and then one every 10 feet or so along the row. Brace the end stakes by driving a post at something like a 45º to 60º degree angle as a brace, and wiring it tightly to the vertical end post. Just one strong wire at about 5 feet is enough to hold them upright and that is all you need. Use a turnbuckle so you that can tighten the wire as needed. This is a loose and ramshackle arrangement, but it is good enough. Investing in anything more substantial is not necessary and is just a waste of time and money for these simple trial rows. We are just trying to keep the trees from falling over. They can grow for two or even three years without trellising, just don’t put it off for 13 years like I did!
Of course food and water will probably make them grow faster, unless you are on very naturally fertile soil with good summer rains. I fertilize randomly. I tend to lean a little more heavy on nitrogen and potassium in the early years and then phosphorous later on when they are getting closer to fruiting age. I’m not sure it makes much difference though.
I’m not sure what to do about pruning. My tendency is to just let them grow, but I would avoid growing multiple stems, so some training is necessary. I have no idea if training branches to downward angles to encourage fruiting would be useful or not. It is very different to grow a seedling to fruiting for the first time, vs growing a scion from an already fruiting cultivar to fruiting size. The new seedlings are somewhat on their own schedule as to when they decide to fruit. Like any organism, they have to reach sexual maturity and that is a process that can take time. It is said that growing a lot of buds on the tree will help, I don’t have enough data to confirm or deny that.
Another option is to graft onto already fruiting trees. In my observations so far this has not caused them to fruit more quickly. I asked Freddy Menge about this and he said he hasn’t notice them to fruit more quickly either. I’m not saying they won’t, or that they may not be able to be tricked to fruit more quickly in some way on an established fruiting tree. I just haven’t noticed that myself. One thing that is clear is that seedlings are different and there is an effect of them just taking their own sweet time to come into fruiting. If grafting to established trees, I would shy away from overcrowding the tree, but rather giving each seedling enough room to grow a substantial branch with a lot of buds.
If I had an established orchard of standard varieties that I was not very interested in, I might take this frankentree approach more often. More likely though, I would save those foundation trees for grafting out new selections that seem promising from the seedling trials. I think it is important to graft promising seedlings onto their own trees or onto foundation trees right away, to see how they perform in the open on a normal healthy tree, vs in the crowded trial rows. I never really anticipated how much space and resources growing out selected varieties was going to take. I have selected 21 apples now and more are coming. I want multiple trees of each of those for testing and for fruit and scion wood production. That math grows pretty fast. If you have a sizable project, keep that eventuality in mind. One option is to plant foundation trees when you plant the seedlings, or soon after, so that you have fruiting trees to graft those promising seedlings out to when the time comes. You would probably want those trees to be dwarf or semidwarf to encourage rapid fruiting. That way the trees will be fruiting well by the time you need them. If they have grown enough to have a nice articulated framework, they will offer lots of places to graft on new scions, which can provide substantial fruit pretty quickly after grafting.
A possible issue with growing frankentrees of seedlings like this is that if the tree gets a virus, the whole tree and all those new seedlings will have the virus. Avoid putting seedlings onto trees that are housing random varieties from random sources. A better way is to use certified disease free rootstocks for foundation trees, or even just random new seedlings. Seedlings do not carry virus from the parent. At the least, if you use some established variety, try to be sure they are not infected with apple mosaic virus.
Currently, I’m growing out my selected seedlings on BUD10 for stand alone trees. I’ll put these on something like a 6 to 9 foot spacing in the row. They should be big and healthy enough to grow good trees and fruit, but not take up too much space. Interstem trees and other mid sized rootstocks up to M26 size should give similar results.
Another option for growing out selections is to use the diagonal cordon system. Diagonal cordons fruit very fast and are very space efficient. I planted mine at 18 inches apart in the row for trialing varieties to see if I want to grow them or use them in breeding. I would plant seedling selections on a 2 foot spacing instead. There are many other systems out there to choose from these days, but I don’t know much about them. Apple growing is now largely done on trellises in these intensive systems, so they are getting it down to a science with the training, pruning and maintenance. That information is available out there if you want it.
There are a lot of options with this part of the process. I’m still experimenting and probably always will be. Growing seedlings out for two years, then grafting the tips out to dwarfing stocks on as close as a one foot spacing will certainly work. What is best, who knows at this point. I have been told of a system that uses lights 23 hours a day in a C02 enriched environment at a constant temperature in the 70’s. Apparently you can trick them into fruiting the second or third year this way by getting through that sexually immature juvenile phase very fast. I’d love to try this, but it would be expensive and probably create new problems like fungus and pests. It is appealing though, considering how long it takes apples to fruit.
The next and last post in this series will be on assessing fruits.
