How to independently grow an apple tree from a seed

The availability of apple tree seeds often raises the question - is it possible to grow a tree from them? Of course you can. True, this will take time and some effort, and as a result, wild game with tasteless or bitter fruits may result. However, if you spend a bit of work, you can grow unexpectedly tasty apples or good stocks.

Is it possible to grow an apple tree from a seed and will it bear fruit

It would seem that varietal seedlings are not so expensive to try to grow apple trees on their own. Attempts to grow an apple from a seed are explained by the desire of the gardener to reproduce one of his favorite varieties (especially if the variety is rare), the intention to have their own stocks for vaccination, the desire to save on buying seedlings, or just sports excitement, “what if it works out?”.

It is quite possible to get a tree from a seed, despite some difficulties with germination (germination at home takes up to 3 months). However, it should be borne in mind that the probability of obtaining both a tree with the properties of the mother apple tree and an inedible wild game is approximately the same. It is impossible to know in advance what will grow, and you will be able to try the fruits of your labors not earlier than in 6-7, or even in 10-12 years.

Seedling apple trees - video

If you still manage to grow an apple tree with tasty fruits, it may turn out to be tall and not too convenient for pruning and harvesting (unlike purchased seedlings grafted onto weak rootstocks). But this is not a rule at all: sometimes semi-dwarfs and dwarfs are obtained from seedlings.

Apple-seedlings come into fruition late, but grow faster than vaccinated ones, they are distinguished by strength and health.

If you receive an unsuccessful regarding the fruits of the tree, you should not be upset - you can plant a varietal stalk on a young apple tree. In general, the use of stocks grown from seeds makes it possible to obtain more winter-hardy, hardy plants with a long lifespan. It is because of these qualities that apple seedlings are used by breeders.

Some apple seedlings are so good that they are presented as new varieties, for example, the Titovka Seedling, the Kravchenko Seedling, the Pudovskaya Seedling, the Solntsedar Seedling.

Varieties spontaneously emerged from seedlings, in the photo

For teaching healthy, seedlings, seedlings are best suited: forest apple, as well as varieties Pepin saffron, Brown striped, Chinese. Antonovka syants often repeat the properties of the parent variety.

How to grow an apple tree from a seed at home

If you decide to grow an apple tree on your own, first of all you need to decide on the variety and choose absolutely ripe (and possibly ripe) fruits. The extracted seeds must be carefully examined: at the pointed end of the seed, a greenish speck should be visible. There are cases when seeds began to germinate already inside the apple.

In ripe apples, you can often find already sprouted seeds.

Seed preparation

Unlike vegetable seeds, apple seeds require good preparation for good germination:

1. After collecting the mature seeds, they are washed with running water to remove all foreign substances.
2. Seeds are placed in a plate and filled with water. So they should stand for 3 days, and the water needs to be changed every day. On the third day, it is desirable to enrich the water with a growth stimulator - sodium humate or Epin.
3. Stratify the seeds, i.e. expose them to cold to simulate natural conditions. This helps to improve the germination and rejection of unsuitable specimens. Seeds should be placed in a tray filled with wet sand mixed with activated carbon powder, sawdust or moss sphagnum, cover with a piece of perforated film and put in the refrigerator for 2.5-3 months, on the lower shelf (temperature should be at + 4 ... + 5 ^aboutFROM). It is necessary to periodically check the moisture of the substrate, the absence of mold and the degree of germination of seeds.

Video stratification of seeds

Seed planting time

The seeds laid down for stratification in January - February are usually ready for spring. If it is still too cold outside, you can plant the sprouted seed in a flower pot with nutrient soil.

Prepared apple seeds germinate well in containers with nutrient soil

In general, if desired, you can grow a seedling of an apple tree at home for 6-12 months. In this case, the seeds can be prepared and planted in the soil at any time of the year. Planting a seedling in a permanent place should be made in late April or early May. As you grow, you will need to periodically transplant the plants into more prodigious dishes.

Summer and autumn sowing of apple seeds is also possible. In this case, the seeds obtained from apples in the summer (autumn), after washing and soaking, are immediately planted in the ground. During the autumn and winter months, the seeds swell and undergo a natural stratification, and in the spring they give friendly shoots. The main requirement is to plant seeds 3-4 weeks before the onset of frost.

Soil preparation and seed sowing

The soil for both home cultivation and for planting in open ground should be enriched with nutrients. If growing in containers is planned, they are filled with a mixture of fertile soil, humus and peat with the addition of a mixture of superphosphate (30 g), potassium sulfate (20 g) and ash (200 g) for every 10 kg. The soil in the garden is prepared in the same way - the indicated proportions of mineral fertilizers are applied to each square meter. You can limit yourself to the introduction of only azofoski and peat.

For planting seeds in the soil make small grooves (not deeper than 5 cm). If sowing is carried out in the fall with the expectation of replanting young plants next spring to a permanent place, you can place the seeds at a distance of 10-15 cm from each other with aisles of 20-30 cm. If the plants remain at the sowing place for 1-1.5 years, the distance between seedlings and rows you need to double.

Seeds are planted in grooves, cut by lace

Crops are watered abundantly, but carefully so as not to erode the ground covering the seeds.

To water apple seeds, use a watering can with a fine-mesh strainer so that the seeds do not float to the surface of the soil. Seeds that are still bare, must again be sprinkled with earth.

Water the seedlings as carefully as possible.

If already sprouted seedlings are planted in the ground, this is done in the morning or evening hours in the following order:

1. They beat off a straight line with coated lace and cut a groove 3-5 cm deep along it.
2. Using a pointed wooden peg with a length of 20 cm and a diameter of 15 cm along the groove, pits are made with a step of 10-15, pits are made with a depth corresponding to the length of the roots of the seedlings.
3. Take seedlings for one of the cotyledons and lower them into the pit. Carefully crush the soil around the plant.
4. Plantings are watered in 2 stages: first, they slightly moisten the soil surface, and water is absorbed by more abundant watering.

Seedling selection

Often, seeds grow from seeds and it is advisable to reject them as early as possible. The first sorting and thinning is carried out when four real leaves are opened on the seedlings. At this point, you can already distinguish obvious wild animals by the following signs:

• the leaves are small, bright green, sometimes with a serrated edge;
• long internodes and small stem thickness;
• thin straight spikes on the stem and shoots.

Varietal-bearing apple trees often have curved and slightly pubescent leaf blades. In apple trees with red fruits, the leaves usually have anthocyanin (reddish) color, which is how they differ from wild animals.

From his own experience in growing apple from seeds, the author may note that their cultivation is not very difficult. Often they germinate spontaneously when seeds accidentally enter the soil. You can not waste energy on preparing seeds, but just sow them in the ground before winter. Typically, approximately half of the seeds germinate in spring. With timely weeding and watering, plants with a height of 0.5 m are obtained by the end of the first year of life. In order to provoke branching, you need to pinch the top of the shoot. Seedlings with the largest leaves need to be left, and the rest can be eliminated, if only they are not needed as a stock. The seedlings of Antonovka, Kitayka yellow, Raspberry, Saffron Pepin are quite recognizable in taste and quality. Nevertheless, each of the seedlings belonging to the same cultivar differs in terms of yield, timing of bearing fruiting, size of fruits, and cyclical fruiting. So when growing apple trees from seeds, you can feel like a breeder!

Caring for apple seedlings

For the successful development of seedlings, they must be properly looked after.

Watering and feeding

The soil must be kept moist. In the first days after planting, you need to water with a small amount of water twice a day - in the morning and closer to evening (in hot weather you can not water it). Then, during the first year of life (while the root system of the seedling is small), watering should be done every 7-10 days.

In summer, seedlings need to be fed. Such widely used organic fertilizers as manure and chicken droppings are better not to use in the first year - they can burn young sprouts. A safer type of fertilizer for seedlings is humus infusion or humic additives.

For young seedlings, it is better to use not manure, but ready-made humic fertilizer

At the end of summer, young plants, like adult apple trees, are fed potassium-phosphorus fertilizers, which contribute to better ripening of shoots. When loosening the soil, potassium chloride (15-20 g / m²) and superphosphate (30-40 g / m²) After making minerals, the soil is watered.

Seedling transplant

Usually, apple seeds are not sown one at a time, and with good germination and a large number of suitable plants, sooner or later the question arises of transplanting plants to another place.

If seedlings are grown to produce stocks, they need to be dug at one year old in the fall (October). All remaining leaves are cut off from the plant and the central root is cut at a distance of 18-20 cm from the root neck. This is done to form a more branched root system and limit the growth of seedlings. Before spring vaccination, the stock is stored in a dig or in a cool cellar (the roots should be wrapped with a damp cloth).

If the seedling is grown for fruit, it can be transplanted to a permanent place in the spring (April - May), and in the fall (October).

For the winter, young plants must be enclosed with a net to protect them from rodents.

Growing apple from a seed in a video

Gardeners reviews

An apple tree grown from seeds loses its maternal properties, it makes no sense to do this, in my opinion. If only you need wilds for subsequent re-grafting. It’s easier to find a wild apple tree in the forest and look for young plants under it.

brate-ckrol-ik

//www.bolshoyvopros.ru/questions/1062650-kak-iz-semechki-vyrastit-jablonju.html

Michurin was wrong !, an apple tree grown from a seed will be cultivated, more frost-resistant and will bear fruit as well as a grafted tree. For example, my seedling apple tree is not grafted. And there are a lot of such examples.

Alexey Vinogradov

//otvet.mail.ru/question/24350944

To grow an apple tree from a seed, you need to sow the seeds (for a greater likelihood to sow them, not one, but several). After germination, you will get "wilds", or seedlings of a wild apple tree. Next year, in the spring, you should plant a stalk from the apple tree of the variety that you need. There is no 100% guarantee that you will succeed. If it works out, now you can calmly wait 5 years. Then you will receive the fruits. I advise another option, or rather 2. buy a ready-made grafted graft, it is best three-year-old. It will take better, this is an adult, and it’s not so long to wait a couple of years. If there is no apple variety of the desired variety on sale, and you have, say a very old apple tree, arrange with a specialist, he will cut the stem from your apple tree at the right time (late autumn) and plant it himself. We did just that. Although now there are almost all varieties of enthusiasts.

Tattoo1-106

//www.bolshoyvopros.ru/questions/1062650-kak-iz-semechki-vyrastit-jablonju.html

You can grow it, but there is no guarantee that the apple tree will grow that will produce exactly the same apples from which you want to grow seeds. Now they make hybrids of 2 or more varieties. In principle, apple trees should be grafted onto dwarf rootstocks. And then they can grow up to 9 meters in your height. And you also need to properly grow seeds. First, the seeds are placed for at least 6 weeks in the refrigerator for cooling, after mixing them in a bag with wet peat. Then planted in paper cups and put on a well-lit windowsill. When seedlings grow out of cups, they are transplanted into the ground. In dry or hot weather, water abundantly.

Atya

//www.lynix.biz/forum/mozhno-li-vyrastit-yablonyu-iz-semechka

Sowing seeds of apple trees and growing seedlings is not very difficult. Even a novice gardener can try himself in the role of a breeder and grow a variety of apple trees on his plot, characterized by winter hardiness and good productivity.