This Forum will close on Wednesday 27 March, 2024. Please refer to the announcement on the Discussions page for further detail.
Apple Tree Rootstock
Steven Prentice
Posts: 25
in Fruit & veg
Hello and forgive me if I am aslking something that has been asked before.
Anyway tomorrow the chainsaw is getting an outing and I want to replace the tall trees that are coming down with shorter trees. My thoughts being apple trees or similar and to save costs (I want about 10 trees) to get rootstock and graft whatever apple types I want on top (obviously all done at the correct time in the year)
One thing I cannot find online though, is what is rootstock - I know they say they are the same species as apple trees but what does this mean.
More important, if I get a load of rootstock trees will they grow and produce apples with no interference from me (ie no grafting etc)?
0
Posts
Trees that are used for rootstocks are there to restrict the growth of the tree to a size suitable for the garden.Without a variety grafted on top, they will produce an apple, but not likely to be very edible. The top graft is selected for the fruit quality.
Cherries are often grafted on to Colt rootstock, which gives a tree about 10 ft tall. There is a wild cherry growing next door, 15 years old, 40 ft high. The cherries are so high, the wood pigeons and blackbirds have them all.
This might explain it better..
http://www.emr.ac.uk/projects/rootstock-research-east-malling-history/
https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=359
Thanks.
So rootstock is for example an apple tree that does not taste very nice if you let it grow to produce apples but its still a real apple tree.
Making life more complicated for myself, 10x £15 tree versus 10x £2 rootstock trees plus cuttings of my choice is a a good reason. If I had the time I would grow apple trees from seed to go where I want
Anyway to add an update to the project, the trees eventually came down, and a proper look at the undergrowth shows 4 or 5 decent hawthrown saplings and a lot of ash saplings (all growing from seed) underneath. Ash saplings can vanish one day (why take down a big ash tree to replace it with another that will also one day be a big ash tree), hawthorn can stay - the wild life will like their berries in the winter. And there is still space now it is all opened up for 10 or more apple trees. Looks like I will also have a couple of weeks worth of firewood too for 2017
If I had the time I would grow apple trees from seed to go where I want
Trouble with that is that Apples do not grow true from seed. They are reckoned to be the plant most capable of variation from seed. You could get a decebt ree, but the likely hood is that you could wait 25 years and end up with a very tall tree which produced a crop of tiny bitter apples.
Berghill is right about growing from seed. You might also have to plant 30x root stocks to get 10 grafted trees as many of the grafts will fail and put you back at square one. They may even fail at 2 or 3 years old. Paying a bit extra for a nursery to take all of those losses for you is well worth it in my opinion, particularly as you'll be eating apples a lot sooner than doing it yourself. However, I do appreciate the sentiment and doing it yourself means you can use varieties from trees that you have personally eaten and like the apples from which may in some cases not even be known.