I currently have apricot, almond and cherry seedlings in pots. I have seeds for oak, chestnut (from a blight tolerant tree from a friend’s family farm, and one of its seedlings), peaches, apples, nectarines, grapes, pistachios (Thanks, Joseph!) and…(uh…maybe I should go look?
)… in the refrigerator.
My food forest goes in once it warms up enough out there.
A couple thoughts. An old neighbor in Utah had an apple tree in her back yard. She said it came from one of her kids spitting out the seeds of an apple, and it just grew. It made great juice and apple sauce. As an eating apple it was OK. But the flesh didn’t brown. I was able to dry those apples with absolutely nothing on them. Just fruit. Random accident? Or are good traits far more common than we think, and we just don’t see them because the seeds don’t get planted? When they say that a good apple is 1 in 10,000, they’re talking about a commercially viable variety. One they can sell to grocery stores and transport. I’m guessing that if we don’t want cardboard fruit and a pretty shell the number is closer to 1 in 20. In my experience, probably much lower.
Cherries are a problem for me. I suspect that the sweet cherry varieties are so inbred that they have a hard time surviving. I put maybe 30 seeds in the bag in October. Three germinated. Two survived transplant. In the past I have planted hundreds of cherry seeds. Most didn’t come up. Most of those that did had obvious problems like no chlorophyll, variegated leaves, missing seed leaves, or seed leaves inside the stem. The rest randomly died when they looked healthy (only two got to that point). The two from this year look good so far.
At the same time I have 8 apricot seedlings and 4 almonds, one of which is already developing the “bush” form that I was hoping for (since the wind never stops blowing, I thought a bush form might work better).
In my old yard I had a grape that was a first generation cross between an Interlaken and a Concord. It had the color of the Interlaken, the smell and taste of the Concord, but it ripened early summer and continued to put out more fruit until frost (Interlaken trait). Out of five seedlings kept, two were some variety of Concord, two were crosses, and one never fruited. First generation accident? One in 10,000 chance? Not a chance. Some of the seeds I will plant this year are descendants of that Concord/Interlaken cross and I’m excited to see how they turn out. Others are full Concord, but likely no pure Interlaken, as it’s technically seedless.
Plant your seeds. At worst, in my view, you’ll have firewood in a few years.
