That is great, Jeff. I have been throwing my apple cores out the car window into hedgerows for years. Maybe one seed will germinate…or I feed a family of ants or a mouse for a time. 
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Crab apples grow like weeds over here.
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We have one crab apple tree that we planted 6-8 years ago it produces piles of apples every year. It has survived many droughts and Frosts.
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Same here we have always had crab apple trees. Apparently about the only way to get good apple trees is from clippings for some reasons the seedlings just turn into crab apples.
A good orchard with paw paw trees and other odd fruits is on my dream wish has been for years at my last house I tried but the soil was horrible and my transplants always died. Here I have great soil but am too buys to set it up. Someday…
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I’ve been told that the apples we eat are the results of a man that found an odd ball crab apple tree and kept grafting it onto young crab apple trees. Or something like that. I do not remember the real details. So without people those nice eatable apples would die out in time. Maybe that is not true???
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It is basically true. Some plants simply don’t run true when grown from seeds. From what I have read this is kind of common with fruit trees. You can graft any apples to a crab apples tree to upgrade the root stock and not have to wait so long for the tree to grow. That is how you see apple trees with mutual types of seeds. But I think if you want fruit trees that run true most fruits require that you using trimmings and clone the parent tree.
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I wonder if we could graft a Hard Maple trimming onto an Aspen and have a fast growing Hard Maple tree…
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You might have to put your syrup in bigger or taller bottles to keep up on the sap production when making Maasplepen syrup. 
Bob
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I don’t know about apples, but when I was in school in Florida, every 7th grader in the state had to learn how to graft citrus trees. Turns out, ALL of those are grafted limbs on lemon root stock.
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From what I have read you graft for one of 3 reasons. You have an established tree and want to change the fruit variety with apples this is how an orchard quickly gets into a new trend of apple variety. The second reason I know of is to dwarf the tree so it is easier to reached the fruit on a home orchard. The third reason is to deal with soil issues where the the fruit tree doesn’t have the reliance to deal with some sort of local soil issues.
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Great line-out DanA.
I have three “new” apple trees now productive that were birds-seeds planted.
Shame is their apples although big and clear are soft cooking types. No wintering over storabilty unless cooked/canned/frozen.
Now their root stocks love my soils and conditions well. I never have to water these. The never get leaf curl.
Graft onto them? Maybe. Maybe then I’d get back to a back to a bad wormy apple coddling moth problem I had with the other, better nursery stock apple trees.
Naw. Leave well enough alone. Not everything has to be brainac/man interventions, optimized.
S.U.
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I always thought it would be cool to gave one of the apple trees which was grafted for different verities just to mess with people. To make them try to figure out why different branches on the same tree had different apples.
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You’ve seen those trees in catalogs that have plums, apples, and pears all on the same tree?
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Yup never knew how well they would hold up but they look like a great gag to me.
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The one pure nursery stock Bing cherry tree I’ve been nurturing for 5 years up and died this mid-summer after spring leaf-out… Strange. No other trees around it; apples and pune-plumbs, show this level of stress.
Now the four-on-one much grafted cherry I’d planted to be it’s for-sure pollinator companion is doing just fine. Still waiting for cherrys though. Some year, maybe.
You never know without trying.
Reward, and reduplicate successes.
Note failures and do not beat-the-stick trying to force. Just because . . .
This wastes much life-time you can never get back.
Regards
Steve unruh
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Bummer about losing the cherry tree but atleast there is a little wood you can recover I guess.
You are correct we never know until we try. I get black cherry trees here they grow pretty good for about 15 years and give you a ton of fruit great for jelly but somewhere before 20 years they seem to die back. My best friend about 80 miles south of me just sold his house lot which was 5 acres loaded with big old black cherry trees about 2 feet across or more and nice and straight as an arrow. He said he cut a bunch before he sold the lot. But why they grow really well and live over 100 years on his lot and die here I can’t say. His are literally in a low swamp mine are in the floodplain with plenty of water. My guess is mine get more winter cold stress and it slowly kills them also might explain why I get way more fruit than he does. Nature is odd.
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Hi All, here is a 20 acre block of 60 year old trees harvested within the our old Town limits.
Was a hay field 1920’s thru late 1950’s. Family ownership planted it into Doulas Fir trees to wait out for the Towns future growth.
Those ~50 year old trees were market harvested.
First the limbs and tops piled to burn.
Then permits came through to put it into urban space in-fill housing.
So the tree stumps machine ripped out and added to the piles too. 50+ of these machine high piles by my count.
So they had to contract to have them all-ground up. A BIG diesel engine running full out.
Too season late by then to burn. Plus they could not get the Town to sign off on a Forestry burning permit.
A LOT of equipment’s Dino-diesel used for this land conversion operation.
The last picture shows the empty cleared space where the ground “bio-mass” was trucked hauled away to be converted to sellable mulch.
See. I have said on harvested DF trees we only off site take 1/3 in the trees in the trunks.
Another 1/3 of a trees mass is in the needles, limbs and tops.
Final 1/3 in the in-ground stump and roots systems.
These 2/3rd normally left for forest soil enrichment.
Land conversion then they are in the way. And burnt up reduced to mineral ash. Or hauled away.
Steve unruh
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