Are you able to access Malus sieversii seeds or cuttings? They may contain alleles not present in the M. domestica plants you have in your collection.
Here in the US, a great source of sieversii seeds/cuttings is Eric Johnson at widespreadmalus.com. He maintains a private wild apple (M. sieversii and M. orientalis) collection that he started using material from the USDA. He seeks to make these plants more accessible than those at the USDA. I don’t know about international shipping (unlikely is my guess).
I have a small number of sieversii trees, sourced from the USDA collection, but they aren’t fruiting yet. I will distribute seed inexpensively once they get going.
Great to see you mention this Jason! I am actually conversing with the GRIN database stewards of the greater Malus diaspora. I will be acquiring numerous sieversii accessions in 2025. I will also be pursuing accessions of M. sylvestris. Thanks for the heads up on this resource, tho! Will look into it.
I’m so glad I found y’all! Yes, I new here to this forum. My 8 yr old wanted to sprout apple seeds, so we start saving seeds from the apples we eat… yes, all Gala, wrapping them in wet paper towel into a plastic bag and letting them chill in the fridge for 3 months. Great germination rate, nearly all sprout, and that’s from 3 rounds of 30ish seeds each time. I put them in soil at that point, but I think I haven’t let them stay in the pots long enough… out of 50ish seeds, I’ve got 3 still growing in the yard.
Yes, I’d love apples to eat, but I also love to smoke food over wood fires, and apple gives a nice subtle flavor in smoke. I’m following y’all’s progress!
I did the same thing with Gala seeds, probably about 12 years ago now.
I had great germination without even chilling. Just stuck them in cups of dirt. (They probably experienced some chilling in storage/transport)
I ended up with about 14 trees total but unfortunately the only place I could plant them in ground was not property I could visit often enough to maintain so they were mostly on their own.
Two or three trees actually made it a few years with minimal care, but eventually they all gave in to our summer temps and bad drought.
Wood for smoking is awesome, you could also graft onto them!
That’s what I figured. If these little trees make it through the summers, which are just brutal here in central Texas, I can use them to graph to also. I did a short course on graphing pecans a few years ago and figure technics are similiar? With all this reading on landraces, I’m thinking when this current batch is ready to plant out, I’ll put them closer and know I’ll be culling them as they get bigger. I’ve got 20-30 pushing seeds leaves up from dirt in the bucket I put them in.
That should also help potentially weed out anything that isn’t adapted to the summers, although I’m not sure how much genetic diversity there will actually be within the comercial gala variety tree seeds.
I’m not too far from you, currently just northeast outside of Dallas.
This sounds like an excellent source of genetic material for a potential Landrace! I don’t know how much I would like to have “potato” texture or flavor in my apples in my own selections, but if the chickens love them then they would still be great to have!
Now the goal has evolved to just gather as much genetic diversity as possible, let the environment do the initial selections, and then many years down the line begin choosing for my own preferences.
Im willing to bet that even seeds from a apple-tato might end up expressing something intriguing haha.
This made me think of apple flavored mashed potatoes, which reminded me of apple sauce.
Maybe they would be good apple sauce apples?
Or maybe apple chips?
Hi have you heard about some of the work being done in New England by a fellow named Matt Kaminsky, who goes by Gnarly Pippins? He has an interesting book about how to forage wild apples. He is at least another name to put into the google search as you build your orchard.
Just a couple of weeks ago I came across a podcast interviewing him! Looks like somebody with great insights to learn from and be inspired by. I learned a lot of new things from the one - including fun apple themed terminology and history:
FYI, this is Akiva Silver’s method of propagating new trees. I will be using this method to grow more apple rootstock trees (apple rootstocks root easily) next year, to be used to graft my apple seedlings on (diagonal cordon style).
That’s a very interesting idea. I’ve tried this with cuttings, but it doesn’t usually seem to work. Those root much better for me planted vertically. (Probably because my sandy soil doesn’t hold water at all, so there’s more likely to be moisture further down.)
With a stem that already has roots, though . . . yeah, I could see this working!
According to Akiva, it is a system that gets better with time: each year, more energy will be captured by the shoots, which will be reflected in more shoots being sent out the next year.
Rootstock is generally selected/bred for easy rooting so it should work well for those (probably same for anything that tip or stool layers well).
Oooh. So that is something you don’t just do once – it’s something you do every year. Very cool!
This particularly interests me because I’d like to breed an apple population that is delicious, drought tolerant, and easy to start from cuttings. I’ve decided I don’t like rootstocks – they annoy me. I’d say about 20% of the apple trees I’ve planted have decided to give up on the whole top of the tree, killed off the whole trunk above the graft, and started regrowing themselves from the roots. Bah. I’m so over that.
So what I’m planning to do is buy a bunch of varieties I’m interested in and try rooting them in the ground. I’ll give them willow water and lots of mulch and keep them well-watered to improve their chances. Anything that roots (from among the several dozen cultivars with fruit that sound delicious) will be an excellent parent for me going forward.
I figure there have got to be delicious apples that are easy to root, and people just don’t usually try, because grafting onto rootstocks is the expected approach. Heirloom apples seem particularly interesting, because burr knot has been selected against in most commercial cultivars, but burr knot is a pretty common “flaw” in older apples, dating from back before people started selecting against it because they thought it looked ugly.
Why do I want burr knot? Why . . . (steeples fingers). Burr knot is aerial roots. In other words, a tree that’s just begging to be layered and started from cuttings!
I’m given to understand that burr knot can also make a tree more vulnerable to infections in a humid climate, which is probably another reason it’s been strongly selected against. That’s a serious downside for people in humid climates. But given that I live in an arid climate, that does not particularly bother me.
I think it’s a great idea for every gardener to think about what works best for their climate, as well as their taste preferences, and select based on both things!
Interesting. Just yesterday I was looking at my apple trees and noticed one of them had what looked like air roots. A 2 year old apple seedling at maybe 10 ft tall. It’s the biggest apple tree of the bunch. I also noticed it had some kind of blight but it looks like it healed over.
