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Non-Grafted Fruit trees - Can You Help?!

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Hello there all! I am new to this forum but have heard of it and been directed to some posts in the past.

I am here today to ask a question that no one can seem to help me with.

I am in search of un-grafted fruit trees. I am a permaculture designer and grower with many years of growing experience. I decided to start my food security business this year and am working on a project where the major hurdle is trees that have not been grafted. My friend has a kinship with trees and doesn't want any grafted trees/plants in the landscape. Money is not a limiting factor here. The problem lies in that no one know where to get any of these trees.
I have reached out to the leading universities and they haven't been much help (Kate Evans from WSU has really tried (( thank you )).
I have also entertained the idea of using rootstocks. I don't have any input on what quality of fruit they produce.
I am in South Central Wisconsin zone 5a. I am looking to find air-layered cuttings, rooted cuttings/scions any help is appreciated!
I am looking to acquire an eating apple, cooking/baking apple, a sweet cherry (Amerena is the prefered cultivar), a sour cherry (Montmorency prefered), and a peach.
If anyone has knowledge in this very specialized area I would be eternally greatful.
I have just started my Nursery and have not amassed a lot of mother stock yet so I have not had a chance to delve into this.
Please help as since it isn't a commercial project with 500k behind it the universities don't really care. The master gardeners are left in the dark on this one. The big nurseries just shrug and OGW sent me here.
If you are a landscaper or landscape designer that is looking to do food forests and edible landscapes but need the plants and soil sciences person, that's who I am. Reach out, I am looking to for someone to execute these amazing plans and landscapes with.

thank you to all and I look forward to helping everyone with questions that I can answer!

D. Pitas
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Cade Johnson

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Because apples (and many other fruits) do not reproduce true to seed, the edible varieties arise by extremely rare genetic abnormalities. A discovered edible apple variety for example, would initially be a SINGLE tree, and it would be a tree that has reached sufficient maturity to bear fruit. And the mutations that give rise to edible fruit do not necessarily give rise to healthy rootstock. So even if you could find that one tree, it might be a challenge to transplant or air-root it. An ungrafted edible apple tree would also not be any existing named variety, for better or worse. Rootstock apples, are grown from seed and are generally inedible. Rootstock citrus is "sour orange" which technically is edible, but it is REALLY sour and not sweet.

For an entertaining read on this topic see "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan - one fourth of the book is devoted to the story of Johnny Appleseed.

You have a formidable challenge before you!

Winn Sawyer

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Fruitwood Nursery often has rooted cutting plugs of fruit trees, but usually that stock doesn't update until late spring. But that's only for a few things, not most of the things you're looking for.

Most apples are very challenging to root or air layer, so you may find it's impossible to get them on their own roots unless you plant seedlings, which take a long time to fruit and will be of unknown quality.

Peach seedlings are usually of good quality and pretty precocious, so you should have no trouble finding those. They can also be air layered pretty easily, but seedlings will have stronger root systems.

I don't really understand the reason to avoid grafted trees. Can you explain more clearly? There's a reason grafting is the standard way to propagate most fruit trees. It produces reliable results within reasonable time spans. Grafting does not harm the trees any more than pruning, taking cuttings for rooting, or removing an air layer.

Cristobal Cristo

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Hi Demitrios,

For apple - get a few Antonowka seedlings. It's one of the best apples for cooking/juicing/baking. I grew up eating tons of them. You can get them in Burnt Ridge nursery. I got four, planted them in 2022 spring and they are already taller than me. I'm going to graft one in the next spring and keep the other three as they are.

For sour cherries I would not settle on inferior flavor translucent juice types like Montmorency. There are a lot of cherry cultivars grown as seedling that will give you dark juice full of flavor and health. Please check Honeyberry USA nursery. They have a good selection of sour cherries grown on their own roots and being located in Minnesota, they have similar climate to the one in Wisconsin.

For peaches I think the best would be to try to grow them from seeds. For few reasons:
-I have not seen seed grown peach trees in the nurseries I shop in
-they are easy to grow from seeds and grow true to parent
-because peaches are not the best fruit choice for zone 5, you have a better chance to produce something that will get used to the that environment; all my friends in Chicago and central Illinois always failed with peaches - trees produced for two seasons and they started dying or did not produce at all.

Please remember that there are more fruit trees that may be fit for that specific climate. In Wisconsin I would try American persimmons, paw-paws, pecans.

r ranson

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I wonder if "true to type " would help with your search instead of searching for what it isn't? Depending on the climate, there are quite a few varieties that grow true, but they aren't popular with big nurseries. Smaller nurseries might grow them.

Personally, I just plant seeds from fruits we eat, then decide once they start producing if I like the fruit or want to graph. So far, less than half get grafted. Even if they aren't true to type, they usually produce delicious fruit.

Not sure where the idea of a low chance of producing edible fruit from seed came from.

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Winn Sawyer

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r ranson wrote:
I wonder if "true to type " would help with your search instead of searching for what it isn't? Depending on the climate, there are quite a few varieties that grow true, but they aren't popular with big nurseries.

It depends on what you mean by "true to type." That term is abused, in my opinion. Any tree that produces zygotic seeds is not "true-to-type" even if some landraces tend to produce seedlings that are very similar to the parent. All apples are zygotic, as are all peaches. Landrace apples like Antonovka do have minimal variability in seedlings, but there is still variation and you can't be sure of the fruit quality until it starts to fruit, which might be many years from seed.

Some trees, like certain citrus and mango cultivars, will produce a high percentage of nucellar seeds, which are identical clones of the mother tree rather than being the result of pollination. Those are "true-to-type," but very few fruit species produce nucellar clones.

r ranson wrote:
Not sure where the idea of a low chance of producing edible fruit from seed came from.

For apples, it's generally true if the fruit was grown using standard commercial monoculture methods, where inedible flowering crabapples are usually used as pollenizer, so the seedlings are usually of poor eating quality, being a 50/50 hybrid between the edible apple cultivar and the inedible crabapple. If instead the apple was grown with multiple other edible varieties as pollenizers, then the seedlings should usually be of good quality, too.

hans muster

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What exactly does your friend want, or not want?

No grafted trees?
No tree which are propagated vegetatively?
Trees which are unique?
Natural trees?

Because if natural is what he wants, grafts are something which happens in nature. Especially root grafts.

Roots from a rootstock can for example be grafted onto a scionwood, in this case the scion might produce own roots

Ben Zumeta

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I’d concur with the recommendation of Burnt Ridge for rootstock and seedling trees. I have also planted hundreds of seedling trees from apple mash leftover from cider pressing, both for myself and from community pressing events. This is based on Sepp Holzer’s methods. I spread the mash an inch or two thick and cover with woodchips. This seems the best way to plant on poor soil. It seems to me it should work with other fruits. I will keep the strongest and let them fruit. If the fruit is good enough for cider or any other use, I will likely leave them ungrafted, but that is an option if its a spitter apple on a healthy tree.

This is all just my opinion based on a flawed memory

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Demitrios Pitas

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Winn Sawyer wrote:Fruitwood Nursery often has rooted cutting plugs of fruit trees, but usually that stock doesn't update until late spring. But that's only for a few things, not most of the things you're looking for.

Most apples are very challenging to root or air layer, so you may find it's impossible to get them on their own roots unless you plant seedlings, which take a long time to fruit and will be of unknown quality.

Peach seedlings are usually of good quality and pretty precocious, so you should have no trouble finding those. They can also be air layered pretty easily, but seedlings will have stronger root systems.

I don't really understand the reason to avoid grafted trees. Can you explain more clearly? There's a reason grafting is the standard way to propagate most fruit trees. It produces reliable results within reasonable time spans. Grafting does not harm the trees any more than pruning, taking cuttings for rooting, or removing an air layer.

The reason for ungrated is a request by the person who I'm working for (my Uncle). He has a kinship with his trees and really wants them to be true to form.

Good Growing!

Winn Sawyer

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Demitrios Pitas wrote:
The reason for ungrated is a request by the person who I'm working for (my Uncle). He has a kinship with his trees and really wants them to be true to form.

Ok, so the concern is not that grafting injures the tree (what I had assumed), but rather that he believes the rootstocks "want to" grow their own branches and fruit? And that merging two plants so that the roots of one plant nourish and support branches from another plant is somehow stifling or inhibiting the desires of the rootstock?

What if you allow the rootstock to grow two trunks, grafting only one of them and then pruning the other one as needed to keep them in balance? I do this with most of the avocado seedlings that I graft, because I want to evaluate the seedlings for hardiness along with testing grafted varieties. That way the tree can grow its "true form" while also supporting branches that will fruit sooner and with known fruit quality.

Demitrios Pitas

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So my uncle is rather specific. He speaks to and meditates with the trees. He wants a plant/tree that doesn't have any wounds. He has stated that even budding/bud grafting is not something he wants to pursue. I have kind of come to the conclusion that I will be starting the peaches from seed.
The Cherries look like a go from HoneyberryUSA ( just waiting for a e-mail back confirming that they are non-grafted ). The apples can be wrangled as maybe an Antonovka and a N. Spy or some other combo.
My uncle is a retired engineer and want to spend his time caring for his trees and plants. He is on the way to producing a "Period Correct" property.
His house is 1907 and he has plans for a circa 1900's greenhouse as well, his home is already restored. Maybe that helps to understand the reluctance to anything newer. To have antique and heirloom varieties are of the highest priority within a cost range.

Good Growing!

Winn Sawyer

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Demitrios Pitas wrote:
He wants a plant/tree that doesn't have any wounds.

Ah! So that would mean no rooted cuttings or air layers (which have been cut from their original roots), and no pruning either. You'll need to just plant seedlings of varieties that are known to produce relatively stable offspring, and he will need to be OK with waiting a decade or more for them to start fruiting for some of the things.

I doubt anyone sells cherries that aren't grafted or at least airlayered, but maybe!

Cristobal Cristo

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Demitrios Pitas wrote:His house is 1907 and he has plans for a circa 1900's greenhouse as well, his home is already restored. Maybe that helps to understand the reluctance to anything newer.

Grafting existed already in pre-Roman times. I still respect this purist approach of having trees not altered. I think it's sweet.
I would also recommend crab apple seedlings.

Joseph Lofthouse

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Winn Sawyer wrote:he will need to be OK with waiting a decade or more for them to start fruiting for some of the things.

Current best practice for fruit tree breeding includes precocious fruiting as a primary selection criteria. Then a person can breed more generations in a lifetime.

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Winn Sawyer

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Joseph Lofthouse wrote:

Winn Sawyer wrote:he will need to be OK with waiting a decade or more for them to start fruiting for some of the things.

Current best practice for fruit tree breeding includes precocious fruiting as a primary selection criteria. Then a person can breed more generations in a lifetime.

That makes sense, but I didn't gather that the OP was interested in starting a breeding project. Do you know of a good way to find seedlings of particular fruit trees that are part of a population already selected for precociousness? I would love to know of that myself, too!

For the avocado project I'm organizing, I'm not expecting a next generation of fruiting-age trees for a very long time (maybe ever!), but I certainly expect precociousness will end up being one selection criteria that will be forced upon us whenever we reach that stage of the project. Any tree able to reach fruiting size during the years in between our worst test winters will be at a big advantage.

Demitrios Pitas

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Not all fruit trees will take that long to fruit. Most will move to fruit in 5-8 years.
I don't know that I mentioned that I am an experienced grower. I have zone 9 under my belt and have lived in WI for most of my life now.
I know how to push plants to grow faster than normal without damage. The fact is that I told my Uncle that without grafted trees he would be waiting and we talked about the likelihood of waiting 8 years. We are planting Pecans as well and I made it very clear that that may be a minute . . .
Based on site evaluations and soil testing, we have a really nice area to work with ( with regards to succession and soil conditions ).
Avacados in zone 8 ?/! that will be a project for sure! I am not aware of many north of W Palm Beach that had a lot of success keeping them going, much less fruiting reliably. More power to you though. It's work that has to be done for the good of the rest of us.
I will be firing Cherry and Peach so that I have private stock and scions to pull from. Rootstocks are everywhere, they grow in the ditches here. I have found out that true to seed trees are a very underserved portion of the market! I found four nurseries and they are all sold out already! That's just peaches. I tell you a person can make some money with just popping off some seed these days. A breeding program, not a well documented one if I do go there. I would have to collect enough genetics to make crossing them worth it.
D.

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Winn Sawyer

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Oh definitely true that some things will be sooner, and I don't know about the precociousness of Antonovka or Northern Spy apples, but it's definitely the case that some apples can take that long to start fruiting.

Peach seedlings are almost always reliably similar to their parents, and often fruit in just a few years, so you could even start your own seeds now and have nice trees pretty soon.

Demitrios Pitas wrote:
Avacados in zone 8 ?/! that will be a project for sure! I am not aware of many north of W Palm Beach that had a lot of success keeping them going, much less fruiting reliably. More power to you though. It's work that has to be done for the good of the rest of us.

The latest batch of 150 seeds in the project came entirely from trees grown in north central FL (120 from Gainesville and 30 from Citra). It's early days still, though, as my greenhouse trees are only on their third leaf and haven't set fruit yet.

Michael Bajema

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So, if you're in Wisconsin, and looking for non-grafted trees, you should look into Mark Sheppard's nursery. Not the fruits you are looking for, but a good place to know about: https://www.forestag.com/collections/fruiting-trees-and-shrubs?page=1

Eino Kenttä

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Okay, I don't know if the domesticated varieties are the same in this regard, but wild cherries (both Prunus avium and P. cerasus) sucker quite a bit. Unless all the domesticated ones have had this trait bred out of them, getting own-root ones shouldn't be impossible.

Jenny Wright

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Demitrios Pitas wrote:Not all fruit trees will take that long to fruit. Most will move to fruit in 5-8 years.

I have two apple seedlings out of about eight survivors that fruited in 4-5 years. It's been 9 years since starting that first batch of seeds and the rest haven't bloomed. So for my little experiment, I've got 25% early fruiting, and 75% nothing so far. Just throwing in my results.

John Wolfram

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Based on the criteria given, it seems like the best option would be to get some fruit from a small nearby u-pick orchard and plant the seeds. That will give you the best chance of growing a tree that is adapted to your area and produces good quality fruit.

Luke Mitchell

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Winn Sawyer wrote:Fruitwood Most apples are very challenging to root or air layer, so you may find it's impossible to get them on their own roots unless you plant seedlings

I don't have a lot of experience with apples but, last winter, I successfully grafted a few trees and then plunged offcuts from the rootstock into some well-draining potting mix (60-40 sand:compost mix). From the 6 that I tried to root, 5 were successful. I made sure that I kept the trees protected from the frosts and well watered during our summer drought but, other than that, they didn't get much attention. Perhaps its because these cuttings were from a strain selected as a rootstock (MM106) and so are particularly vigorous and well-suited to rooting.

I would be tempted to obtain fruit trees on a semi-vigorous rootstock such as M25 or MM106 and, once they are established, to take cuttings in the winter and try to root those. If they take then you will have an abundance of non-grafted apple trees of a known fruit cultivar. The downside to this is that you might find the resulting trees are quite disease prone - an undersung role of most rootstocks is their added resistance to some of the many diseases that plague apples and other domesticated fruit trees. You might not have these problems if you don't live in a traditional orchard area, however.

rootstocks.jpg

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Demitrios Pitas

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I have tried to get information as to what kind of fruit the rootstocks produce. I have gone as far as to get people at the USDA in NY at Cornell. They don't have the info (strange?/!) or don't want to tell me.
I have a no-spray u-pick orchard 80 miles from me and plan to visit them this spring. In my area apple trees are like weeds. Jim Kovaleski (look him up if you like), told me it's the same in northeastern Maine. He said that you can sample many many apples that just grow wild. This is what I would like to do but with the propensity for crab apples to pollinate it's a craps shoot.
I have also considered grafted trees and burying the graft union. This would encourage the scion to grow it's own roots too. I have been told this has it's risks with rots and disease as it will likely overtake the rootstock. However, there is the bright side of getting double the vigor from starting with a larger root mass once the scion starts to root.
I am in the dead of winter here so all I can do is wait. Plus the person that I am doing the project for has been out of town for two weeks and I can't move forward without word from them.

P.S. Jim told me personally, "if you learn one thing this year, learn to graft".

Good Growing

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Luke Mitchell

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Demitrios, you raise an interesting question about the fruits of the common root stocks. I have just planted out two of my MM106 cuttings and I intend to keep them for future root stock material. I had intended to coppice them after a few years and air-layer the shoots, using woodchip mounded around the stool, but I am now a little intrigued about what fruit they might produce and I might leave a stem or two to grow on.

As for eating wild apples, I've done a fair amount of that and the fruit is often OK. I've not found a wild tree with 'good' fruit but plenty with passable: good for an apple or two, better for cooking with. They usually lack the sweetness of cultivated apples.

I know of a man who has found an excellent wild apple by the beach in north Pembrokeshire. The variety has been named Blas y twyny meaning 'Taste of the dunes'.

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Winn Sawyer

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Luke Mitchell wrote:Demitrios, you raise an interesting question about the fruits of the common root stocks. I have just planted out two of my MM106 cuttings and I intend to keep them for future root stock material. I had intended to coppice them after a few years and air-layer the shoots, using woodchip mounded around the stool, but I am now a little intrigued about what fruit they might produce and I might leave a stem or two to grow on.

This page has photos of MM106 tree, flowers, and fruit, which looks at least large enough to be worth eating if it doesn't taste terrible:

https://apples.extension.org/apple-rootstock-info-mm-106-emla/

It's a cross of Northern Spy and M-1 according to that, and this table describes M-1 as an old "Paradise" type of apple commonly used as a rootstock in England:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malling_series

Demitrios Pitas

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Winn Sawyer wrote:

Luke Mitchell wrote:Demitrios, you raise an interesting question about the fruits of the common root stocks. I have just planted out two of my MM106 cuttings and I intend to keep them for future root stock material. I had intended to coppice them after a few years and air-layer the shoots, using woodchip mounded around the stool, but I am now a little intrigued about what fruit they might produce and I might leave a stem or two to grow on.

This page has photos of MM106 tree, flowers, and fruit, which looks at least large enough to be worth eating if it doesn't taste terrible:

It's a cross of Northern Spy and M-1 according to that, and this table describes M-1 as an old "Paradise" type of apple commonly used as a rootstock in England:

I too have looked at the lower link you had posted. I wanted to know the parentage of rootstocks so that I could make an educated guess as to which ones I may have the best chances with. The guys at the USDA did give me some information, but like the universities, they really aren't interested in my pursuits.
They just give me what they know and that is it. I have worked with Hemp and there are many ways to work with breeding. I have not acquired land yet and this is my primary limitation. I have people around me selectively breeding zone 5 peaches, and apricots. Apples and Cherries are the two areas that have no support. Obviously because the path of least resistance is the one taken by so many. My nature is to buck the status quo.
I enjoy hard lessons and steep learning curves. It wasn't uncommon to see me planting plants under black walnut trees just to see for myself (you never know when an unseen environmental factor can give you uncommon results).
I want to be free of supply chains and controlling factors. The original apples that were put on this earth were plenty edible or they wouldn't be what they are today. Where are those genetics? I trust they are under lock and key, and we are not privy to them. Even when I asked, there were only two types that they said (the USDA) they had. My question is, where are the original genetics from things like all the cultivars that everyone loves so much??
They can't all be weak and susceptible to every disease known?? Why aren't they ever just offered??

Too many questions to trust the keepers. I will just by-pass them and pave my own way.

Good Growing!

Kris Winter

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"I have tried to get information as to what kind of fruit the rootstocks produce"

Try the flora for your region (I'm not sure what it is in WI, but there will be a large authoritative book. Jepson's manual is used in California and Crohnquist in the PNW.) It will identify the most likely rootstock escapees. So for example up here in Idaho I'm asked to identify this weird tree that grows in people's yards and it makes these tiny, tiny fruits that look maybe like cherries, and it is the rootstock to many cherry trees, Prunus mahaleb. The flora includes a full botanical description, but if you want photos you can try ihaturalist online.

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Demitrios Pitas

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Thank you. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know.

for WI https://wisflora.herbarium.wisc.edu/index.php

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Luke Mitchell

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This evening I grafted scions onto three of my rooted MM106 cuttings. You can see their root development in the attached photo - interesting how much they seem to vary! All three cuttings were treated identically - pushed into the same pot, same potting mix of home made compost and surplus builders sand (washed by the rain).

Rootstock-cutting-root-systems.jpg

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Mare Sjeme

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Another source for seedling trees could be Edible Acres nursery. I'm not sure about fruits, but they are trying out producing trees from seeds for other trees and some nuts. Their location is somewhere upstate New York.

Demitrios Pitas wrote:
The original apples that were put on this earth were plenty edible or they wouldn't be what they are today. Where are those genetics?

While those original fruit trees produced edible fruits, I think we should take into account that people had different tastes back than - they were definitely not used to so many sweet tastes as people of today had. Point I'm trying to make is what our long time ancestors thought are fine tasting fruit probably isn't near to what we today think is fine tasting.
One example is wild plum, in my area of SE Europe it was widely spread and used up until recently (maybe up to 100-ish years). Nowadays most people think they are too sour, while even just 30-40 years ago they were widely used in my village.
Just my two cents...

Diverse seeds. Aromatic and medicinal herbs. And making stuff from it. Communicating with animals and plants. Stubbornly living by my own rules. Well, most of the time.

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