Help me reproduce with a fruit

So I failed botany... twice.  Third time I got a C- so I felt like a massive success.

Physics, chemistry, math, zoology... aced them all.

Take note of this tree

It is an apple tree of unknown origin.  We know it has been in existence since about 1935.  It was a mature tree when my grandparents bought the farm in 1950.  It appears to be a wild heirloom variant but could also be something common that a bird pooped out 100 years ago and is actually some kind of commercial hybrid.  We're not sure.  It is located at the very far boundary the farm and I remember grandma making apple pies, cobblers, crisps, applesauce, and apple butter from it.  Since it is on a spot on the farm we call "the low gap," they have affectionately become known to us as "gapples."

Despite how it looks right now, the gapple tree is seriously sick.  You might be able to see in the crotch of the tree it is rotted badly.  Since about 1995 there has been no maintenance to it.  Grandpa (green thumb) used to trim it every few years, but it is a sad tree these days.  It no longer produces apples.  To the best of my knowledge it didn't even blossom this year.  Some years it will produce a few fruits but they fall off in July and the deer eat them within minutes.  Even if I did get lucky and find a fruit I'm not sure the seeds would be viable with such an underdeveloped fruit.

I will be youtubing some "how to prune an apple tree" videos and will do my best to help it, but seeing that rot in the crotch tells me it may be too late.

How do I go about perserving the lineage of the tree?  Grandpa was a successful grafter and had a small orchard with 5-in-1 trees (five different apple varieties on one organism), but I have a long history of being able to kill Spider Plants and Pothos in a matter of a few months.  Me = brown thumb.

The goal is to have stand-alone viable trees so that I can have gapples for the rest of my life.  I plan on taking some trimmings and doing a few different things:

1- try my hand at grafting a few so they might produce fruit from which I could get seeds
2- stick some of the clippings in some water/dirt/rootone to see if they take root.
3- give some clippings to a college botany department to see if a couple students wanted to take a whack at it.

Anyone good at this?  I have no idea where to start.  I remember from grandpa that you had to make a specific grafting notch so that the cambium lined up, then he wrapped it with cloth and sealed it with some black goo, but otherwise I'm clueless.  Can anyone give me some tips?

I'm pretty sure every commercial apple tree in the universe is a graft.  They grow a tree with a sturdy base, then graft on the limb of the tree that produces the breed of fruit they want.

It is also entirely possible that I am speaking out my bunghole.

does it flower in the spring ?

are there other apple trees around ?

I'm one of those green thumb shiny happy people you probably hate.  My experience is in citrus, but the basic outline generally is: I cut a branch off, trim it with a nice sharp knife, dip it in water and give it a rough shake to get any excess off, then dip in root hormone powder and then shove in the dirt.  Keep it soaked until you start to see new growth, then keep watering it afterwards.

Now, some specifics.  You aren't going to get anywhere with new growth.  Below is a key lime tree I pulled from the internet.  See the branches that are still bright green? Almost as green as the leaves?  That's new growth.  Follow that back and you'll see what looks like typical bark, that's an established branch.  Has brown, a little green, rough, you might be able to scratch it with a fingernail, but the new growth you could cut it off with a fingernail.  Get a bunch of the established branch, at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the cutting should be the established stuff. 

Make sure your cutting actually has some new growth, that way you know that branch is healthy.

If the Gapple tree is far away, cut excess and then when you get home trim it back.  Using a sharp pair of shears cut it at a 45 angle, then using the sharp knife I mentioned peel back the cambium layer for about 1 inch in 2-3 places around the branch.  Either 180 degrees, or 120 degrees from each other.

(Second image came from this, good resource it looks like https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/yardandgarden/extpub/new-plants-from-cuttings-text-only/)

Water and the root hormone are pretty straight forward.  Follow the instructions on the bottle.  Not sure what is the best hormone for a gapple tree, but as a green thumb I just grab what's on the shelf at the local hardware store.  

When I say shove in the dirt, I usually have a pot prepared beforehand.  I pre-soak the soil so it is nice and saturated, then I let it drain out as much as it wants to (I typically put an inch of gravel in the bottom of my pots so they can drain.)  At that point, after I root hormone the stem, I just poke a hole in the soil with my finger as deep as I can and gently put the stem in there, then push on the soil a couple inches away from the stem so it will squish the soil into the stem without disturbing the root hormone.  Once it is safely ensconsed in the soil I give it another good soak and stick it in the sunniest part of the yard.

Then, seriously, I soak the stupid things daily.  Once per day, put the hose with a shower sprayer on it until water fills the pot (you did leave roughly an inch of clearance from the top of the pot to the soil line, right?)  Majority of it will all drain out, but the goal is to keep the soil nice and damp as much as possible to fight the summer sun.

About 3/4 of the plants I do using this method make it, and generally the ones that don't are because I skipped watering for a day here or there.

Seriously, water the plants.

californiamilleghia said:

does it flower in the spring ?

are there other apple trees around ?

Most years it does not flower.  This year I wasn't there (the farm is 300 miles from me) when it should have been blooming, but we did have a late frost.  I didn't see any remains of any blooms so I'm not hopeful for fruits this year.

No other apple trees for approximately 1/2 mile, and those are ones that grandpa planted in the 70s down by the house.  They haven't been maintained since the mid-90s, so they typically don't produce either.

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Thank you for all that info.  It gives me confidence to try it.

Is there a better time to do it?  I know you're south, but I would imagine fall/winter wouldn't work.  Deciduous trees are too busy pulling back the fluids and chlorophyll to be dormant in the fall/winter.  Is spring better than summer?  I'm thinking I'll be back down to the farm in late June but wondered if that would be too late/early to be successful.

Sorry to hear you've got crotch rot, but good luck grafting the tree.

https://www.instructables.com/Grafting-a-Multi-variety-Apple-Tree/

Earlier in spring after greening the better. Go hog wild on grabbing your science experiments, if you are hoping for 3 good plants/trees from an established retiree you may need to start with 10-15. Worst case is you get 10-15 saplings and you can bring them to the Challenge and give to the rest of us low hanging fruit. 

We have a tree of unknown origin in our yard. It has very sharp spikes on it. If not paying attention as you pass under it on the mower it WILL remove scalp. We refer to it as "shiny happy person tree" the areat thing about this tree is that some time ago something pooped out a pear at/on/in the tree. "shiny happy person tree" is not a pear tree but has an amazing fruiting tree growing from it. 

Good luck on your gapple orchard.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

I'd expect that Spring/Summer would be better.  Grafting is a good option as well.  I've never done it, but I've heard its fairly simple to knock out.   Again, looking at citrus, grafting and cuttings have one strong benefit from seeds they can produce fruit when they are still saplings where a tree grown from seed can take years before it is happy enough to grow fruit

Also, apples don't self-pollinate, from what I remember.  If there aren't other apple trees around you aren't going to get anything from your new trees.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Also, apples don't self-pollinate, from what I remember.  If there aren't other apple trees around you aren't going to get anything from your new trees.

This!  They need a partner within a reasonable distance to produce fruit.  The lack of budding/ flowers does speak to other issues though.    Definitely give the grafting a try, it might take a couple of tries but it sounds as if it would be worth it.   I can relate, this is our “pet” apple tree, it’s one of our favorite things  

My father was an "Orchardist" for many years and I grew up on 15 acres of pears, peaches and apples. I watched him graft apple sprouts onto the root/trunk of another species all the time. So there's a technique to it but it's not rocket science. Even if your tree was healthy, if there aren't other trees nearby to pollinate then there won't be many fruit buds each spring and if the weather is cold where the tree is located then the buds can freeze and you wont get any fruit. Maybe your tree has several problems going on at once?

I have a sickly apple in my back yard, we got it with the house.

I decided to try to save the poor thing and asked a fellow I know who used to work in commercial orchards about how to get it healthy again. Beyond the conventional pruning methods the internet will tell you about, his advice was "Cut it back until you think you're going to kill it". Apparently they need a good, heavy pruning to make them wake up again.

That was two years ago, last year it came back a bit, flowered a little and gave us some apples.

They looked nice, smelled fantastic, were woody inside and tasted awful.

This year it looks like I'm going to get even more of them.

My wife's horses will be very pleased.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

Help me reproduce with a fruit

In reply to ShawnG :

Now that you've got it producing, you need to get it to produce good fruit.  That may be a matter of proper watering and nutrients.

Of course, you could just have horseapples.

Sounds like everyone has you covered here, but just in case you didn't know - if you end up getting some fruit from this tree and want to plant the seeds, the tree that grows from them is not going to be the same. Might not even be remotely the same as your gapple tree. Apples are weird like that. Every commercially grown apple of a particular variety is a clone.

Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" has a pretty good section on this, although he makes the unforgivable sin of misidentifying Seneca lake in it.

Sparkydog said:

My father was an "Orchardist" for many years and I grew up on 15 acres of pears, peaches and apples. I watched him graft apple sprouts onto the root/trunk of another species all the time. So there's a technique to it but it's not rocket science. Even if your tree was healthy, if there aren't other trees nearby to pollinate then there won't be many fruit buds each spring and if the weather is cold where the tree is located then the buds can freeze and you wont get any fruit. Maybe your tree has several problems going on at once?

I know it has several problems, not the least of which is crotch rot and lack of maintenance for 25 years.  I do know that for the first 20 years of my life, the tree produced more apples than grandma could use.  Bushels.  We could easily fill the bottom of the 4x8' wagon and fill 6 half-bushel crates every fall, and that doesn't count what fell off and the deer got to before we could.

I do know that there are no other apple trees within 1/2 mile or so.  Certainly not within the typical range of a bee colony.

Talk to me more about the self-pollinating.  I do know that some varieties of apples can self-pollinate (granny smith, Jonagold, e.g.).  I don't think that this tree is a common variety, but I suppose it's possible that it is monoecious given the fact that I have found zero other apple trees other than the commercial varieties planted at the house.  (see satellite map below)

I suppose it's possible there is somewhere on the farm that has a crabapple, but unlikely.  The forest there is very old-growth and I spend a considerable amount of time on every square inch of the farm.  I think I would have noticed, but its possible I missed one.

In this map:

Red arrow shows location of Gapples
Blue arrow shows location of house/a few apple trees
Green arrow shows Rodney's farm with no known fruit trees
Yellow arrow shows Brian's farm which is about 400 acres of forestry land
Pink arrow indicates the next known apple tree on Randall's farm about 3 miles west
For the sake of scale, the distance between the red and blue arrows is about 1/2 mile as the crow flies.

(I'm sure there are other apple trees, just none that I know of.  It's pretty wilderness there)

cmcgregor (Forum Supporter) said:

Sounds like everyone has you covered here, but just in case you didn't know - if you end up getting some fruit from this tree and want to plant the seeds, the tree that grows from them is not going to be the same. Might not even be remotely the same as your gapple tree. Apples are weird like that. Every commercially grown apple of a particular variety is a clone.

Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" has a pretty good section on this, although he makes the unforgivable sin of misidentifying Seneca lake in it.

I did know this about some plants like hybrids of tomatoes.  I had some hot house tomatoes that sprouted so I tried to grow them.  They got little tiny red fruits on them that tasted more like corn starch than a tomato.  I assumed it was the hybrid nature of it and I was hoping that this was an "heirloom" wild variety that wouldn't fall prey to that phenomenon.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to ShawnG :

Now that you've got it producing, you need to get it to produce good fruit.  That may be a matter of proper watering and nutrients.

Of course, you could just have horseapples.

That might be better than the neglect I'm currently feeding it.

In reply to ShawnG :

Plants love love.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to ShawnG :

Plants love love.

MythBusters disproved that (plants subjected to loud death metal and negative thoughts were just as healthy as plants treated to mellow music and positive thoughts).

Having said that, I have two plants that are "pets"...a Pothos and a cactus...berk with them = berk with me. 

Streetwiseguy said:

I'm pretty sure every commercial apple tree in the universe is a graft.  They grow a tree with a sturdy base, then graft on the limb of the tree that produces the breed of fruit they want.

It is also entirely possible that I am speaking out my bunghole.

ShawnG said:

I have a sickly apple in my back yard, we got it with the house.

I decided to try to save the poor thing and asked a fellow I know who used to work in commercial orchards about how to get it healthy again. Beyond the conventional pruning methods the internet will tell you about, his advice was "Cut it back until you think you're going to kill it". Apparently they need a good, heavy pruning to make them wake up again.

That was two years ago, last year it came back a bit, flowered a little and gave us some apples.

They looked nice, smelled fantastic, were woody inside and tasted awful.

This year it looks like I'm going to get even more of them.

My wife's horses will be very pleased.

Apples aren't "true to type," most other trees are similar.  Since they can not self pollinate you get a random shot at what genes the seed has.  Most fruits you have eaten share the same genetic makeup that someone back in history ate and decided tasted good enough to share.  New trees are created through grafting.  My Grandpa grafted all the giant pecan trees they had on their property, it's one of the skills I wish I'd had him teach me.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

For the record, can you clarify the part about "when my grandparents bought the farm in 1950"?

My Peach tree in the back yard is over 50 years old  and grows probably 100 pounds a year and i do nothing to it accept trim the part that goes over the back fence , 

The Avocado tree has good and bad years for a 60 year old tree , 3 years ago there were hundreds of  avocados , the past 2 years only dozens ,  and I see a lot of bees  and another avacado tree is  600 feet away..........

Side question , once a tree is mature does it always produce the same fruit regardless of what it's cross pollinated with? If the fruit of the tree affected or only the seeds of the fruit if produces? I feel like it's the former ...but nature is weird. 

1SlowVW said:

Side question , once a tree is mature does it always produce the same fruit regardless of what it's cross pollinated with? If the fruit of the tree affected or only the seeds of the fruit if produces? I feel like it's the former ...but nature is weird. 

It's the latter - a granny smith tree (which is to say, granny smith branches that have been grafted onto a suitable rootstock) will always produce granny smith apples, but none of the seeds from those apples will grow another granny smith tree.

Plant genetics are wild, and apples are an extreme example.