“One has less than a half inch between leaf nodes, another almost 2.”
I wonder if the seedling with narrow spacing might be a natural dwarf? Might be a good candidate for a rootstock.
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Yeah, I’m hoping they’ll sprout next year, if they don’t sprout this year. Or at least the year after that, if they don’t sprout next year! 
I thiiiiiiiiink I know what I did wrong. I figured I’d plant winter crops in with the stratifying seeds, so the bed would be doing something over the winter, and there’d be mulch already in place in late spring. I put in winter wheat, peas, and blue mustard. I figured they’d make a nice polyculture. However, only the wheat came up, even though peas and blue mustard usually do great for me. This made me highly suspicious, so I checked online, and . . . yyyyyyyyep! Wheat has allelopathic properties! 
So the wheat is probably to blame for why none of the tree seeds have sprouted. I really should have thought to double check, but . . . sometimes you learn lessons the hard way! 
So . . . next time, I should clearly just put peas and blue mustard (and common mallow, and lettuce, and mache, and whatever other winter crops I want to grow at the moment) into the bed with the stratifying seeds. Winter wheat did great for me this year, so it’s clearly climate suitable, but if it’s gonna be a jerk to all the other plants around it, it won’t work in a polyculture, so it’ll have to go somewhere all on its own.
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I think that has some correlation if I’m not mistaken. I’m excited to follow it the next few years to find out.
My seed grown apricot orchard started about ten years ago. I planted 3 sibling groups. One sibling group died entirely for lack of winter hardiness. One group produces really nice fruit. 11 trees remain of about 33 planted. One group grows reliably, but produces fruit I don’t like much. I graft other varieties on to them, including apricot and plum.
The second generation enters its second summer.
My seed grown plums grow well this year. It might take another year to three for them to flower.
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Wow, those are gorgeous! 
Grafting varieties you like onto seedlings with fruit you don’t like is a smart idea. Seed-grown rootstocks are bound to be climate-suitable, and I assume having scions you like making fruit for you means they give you more seeds to plant that are likely to make tasty fruits.
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I thought when you plant a seed from this certain type of variety, such as the cosmic crispy (yum btw) its going to be typically a blend of something else and not that exact cultivure, only if you clone by propagation? or is this becuase you are confident it only was pollantaed by another cosmic crisp? #firstpost #newb #dontkickmeoutlol
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It will be different from the mother plant.
The common advice is that growing from seed will only produce a tree with bad quality apples. This has proven to be an exaggeration. Many people are growing apples from seed and seeing a wide range of results with many trees being good and some even great.
And if you grow a tree from seed and the apples are not what you wanted you can can just graft on some preferred varieties.
Apple genetics are almost as straightforward as humans’. Apples are (usually) diploid, with half their genetic material coming from their mother, and half from their father. There’s a teensy bit more nuance than that, in that cytoplasmic DNA is inherited only from mother to child, so which cultivar you use as the mother will change which cytoplasmic DNA the child has. Other than that, you can pretty much just assume that children tend to resemble their parents.
Look at a human family where the parents have four kids: maybe all four kids look similar to each other, maybe they all look totally different, maybe some look just like their mother or just like their father, etc. The same thing will happen with apples, and with most plants. Any of those options are quite common.
Seeds are (usually) the result of sexual reproduction, so you can expect (the vast majority of) seedlings to have a unique genome that takes half from each parent.
If you want to get exactly the same thing, use cloning! 
Most animals don’t clone themselves naturally, but a lot of plants do. Suckers, divisions, pups, rooted cuttings, etc. are all natural ways of cloning a plant. Grafting tends to be the preferred option when a perennial species is amenable to being grafted but not very cooperative about rooting cuttings. Apples are often resistant to rooting cuttings, so they’re usually cloned through grafting, but there are some apple cultivars that can be rooted from cuttings (for instance, the most common rootstocks are generally cloned that way).
Genetics are super fun! 
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Just make sure you are cloning what you’re actually wanting.
A sucker from a fruit tree may be coming from a rootstock.
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Good point. That’s well-worth mentioning. If it’s a grafted plant, the sucker is usually from the rootstock. (Apples, for example.) So you don’t want that sucker unless your intention is to clone the rootstock (for instance, to graft onto it).
If the plant isn’t grafted, then a sucker is often the ideal way to clone it. Raspberries, sassafras, pawpaws, toon, and many, many other edible bushes and trees are fond of suckering and turning into huge clumps.
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I have 9 surviving apple seedlings. The bed wasn’t weeded much but that may have helped them this year in the heat.
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They look great!
(Laugh.) One of my seedling apple trees is only that tall, and it’s three years old. I have several (which have not been watered any more frequently) that are over four feet tall, though!
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5 seedling apples have survived this summer with no watering. They were shaded on the west by weeds, and under deep woodchip mulch in heavy clay.
Only one pear seedling survived.
All the older (teenage? Pre-teen?) apricots survived, and one seedling.
8 plums and plum crosses so far. We’ll see how they do in their first winter.
One almond is in the ground. Another needs to go in, but without a set almond row I’m not sure where to put it. Almonds appear to hate my soil, they all die.
Peaches are still the winner. Still have four of the originals, 6 from last year and four planted this spring.
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Peaches are almost weeds in my garden and yard. Probably because so many are ruined by squirrels while they are still very immature but apparently the seeds are good anyway and the squirrels scatter them everywhere.
I have an apple tree that is about 10 or 12 years old and about twenty feet tall. It is a really pretty tree growing more like a shade tree. It has never flowered that I noticed but yesterday I found three little apples that weren’t horrible, actually slightly sweet. There are probably thousands or cedar trees within half a mile of here including a couple big pet ones in the yard, apples do horribly, rarely produce anything at all. I’ve been cutting most of them down for smoker wood.
Even when all the other trees are completely eaten up with it, this little tree has never shown any sign at all of any disease. It is apparently completely immune. I found four nice looking seeds in the apple I ate, if the others have four more, I’ll have twelve seeds. Maybe something in the F2 generation will still be immune to disease but also make larger, sweeter apples. I’ll let you know in about ten years. 
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Wow, congratulations on getting your first seeds from a seedling apple! And congratulations on having a fruit tree seedling that seems to be immune to diseases that take out almost everything else in the species. That’s a jackpot for your apple needs!
Jackpot, well maybe assuming the F2 seeds grow and that some of them turn out to make nice apples, like I said, I’ll let you know in about ten years. I have no clue how long a seed grown tree ordinarily takes to start flowering, but ten years seems slow to me. Pears, peaches, cherries and plums don’t take that long and all of them are good tasting but not all good producers. Pears and peaches are the easiest to grow and the fastest to produce.
I’ll keep this tree and it’s offspring but overall unless you want to get out a chemical spray, which I don’t, apples are mostly a waste of time here. Combination of disease and drought equals zero apples most years. All of the expensive grafted trees I planted long ago have since been cut down and replaced with pears and peaches.
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I think I’ve read somewhere that seedling apples tend to take anywhere from 5-10 years to start fruiting. Which is a ton of variance. I’m pretty sure Steven Edholm speeds that up by grafting branches of his seedlings onto established rootstocks; I think he can get fruit in two or three years that way.
But of course, if you don’t have any other apple trees around right now, that’s not likely to be a great approach for you . . . (Laugh.)
Still, if nothing else, that disease-resistant seedling you have might very well make an ideal rootstock! And there’s no reason you would have to give up on it making its own fruits, either; you could just test the concept out by grafting a branch of some apple you’d really like to try onto on of your seedling’s branches, and see if that does all right.
I’m disinclined to do that myself because I’m more inclined to just be patient and see what a seedling tree on its own roots offers me. Buuuuut if, after all that time, a particular seedling tree winds up with fruit I don’t like, I will most likely keep that tree and graft something I prefer onto it. (Very likely a branch from one of my other seedlings that I love and want more of! )
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This is a fun thread. I’ve dabbled with growing peaches from seed too, but seeing everyone’s survival rates here makes me want to try apples next season. Good point about just burying cores deep, I’d have thought they’d rot for sure.
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Peaches have been so easy for me to start from seed! And apples have been even easier. Seriously, apple trees are a “weed” in the parts of my garden where I bury apple cores and don’t want apple seedlings.
In fact, for me, apples are so easy to start accidentally by burying apple cores that I only bury apple cores in places where I don’t plan to selected apple seeds, because I wouldn’t be able to tell volunteers-from-cores apart from seedlings from my selected seeds.
As for peaches, I get about 10% germination in the first year after planting them, and then another 40% the second year. Maybe another 10% across the third, fourth, and fifth years combined.
I’ve seen far fewer seedlings appear from plum or apricot seeds. Maybe 10% germination rate. I’m not sure if that’s normal or not; I wouldn’t be surprised if my results with peach trees were abnormal. See, most of the peach seeds I planted were 100-ish pits from my neighbor’s very-well-climate-adapted peach trees, planted immediately after eating the fruits. I got 50-ish trees from those 100-ish pits.
Those peach pits have had such a high germination rate that I have pulled out a whole lot of less-vigorous seedlings, and/or seedlings that wound up being in inconvenient places because I changed my mind about how to arrange my garden by the time they popped up. The oldest ones are now two years old, and two of the twenty or so (that I decided to keep) flowered for the first time this spring.
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I read somewhere that for apple trees it’s not age but the number of leaf nodes up the tree. So if you have a tree that puts out lots of nodes and grows fast you might get apples early.
Not sure of that’s true, but other plants do the same.