The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Showing off the fruit from my chance apple seedlings

Long before I moved here, this land was all hay fields and apple orchards.  For at least 30 years between then and the day I moved in, things were neglected.  The fields grew brushy and tangled with brambles and wild grapes and many of the apple trees died off.  Some have remained in decent health and a few have been bearing fruit since I took over the property and began maintaining them.  Around each of the older (60+ years I think) trees there are many younger apple trees that have grown from fallen fruit.  In the last two years many of these juveniles have started to bear fruit as well.  In almost all of these cases the daughter fruit is at least decent enough for eating purposes.  
This video shows some of my Early Fall Apples.  The parent tree is as tall as a power pole at least two feet in diameter at the trunk.  It bears huge delicious yellow fruits just about every year.  From that tree, two seedlings have grown up to also be good producers, though in very different sizes and shapes.   All three are awesome fresh eating and together they make a great applesauce.  I made so much apple sauce this year that if these trees don't fruit for another two years, I'll still be up to my eyeballs in applesauce.  

 

I just noticed my shoes in the video.  HA HA HA!  I am not kind to my footwear.  I trek all over the place in shoes that have no business even leaving a carpeted floor.   I get every possible mile out of them before I throw them away.

That's some big apples. Interesting how the offspring fruit differs from the parent -- wonder what the other parent was?

BTW your link didn't work for me, but figured it out.. here's a direct link:

What a blessing to have a fruit orchard already planted, no matter how neglected it was before you got it. All I can think of is How Awesome! And then to have young trees that produce good fruit, how much better can it get?

Dana Jones wrote:What a blessing to have a fruit orchard already planted, no matter how neglected it was before you got it. All I can think of is How Awesome! And then to have young trees that produce good fruit, how much better can it get?

It's pretty awesome, I have to admit.  We gather hundreds of pounds of apples every year just for feeding to the pigs.  It's insane how much fruit these old trees can produce and there are hundreds of others seedlings that just pop up wild in the fields.  Every year we get to taste about a dozen new wild varieties as well.  It's so much fun to explore new things.

I wonder if the parent tree is a winter banana.  They have that aromatic when ripe and usually a ridge on one side like the ridge on a banana peel. With a cider mill you can extract the juice and then feed the pulp to the animals.

Apples are an amazing tree... I have been using it to replant barren areas...as you found out, it grows all by itself from seeds...it does the same, even in semiarid zones.

These articles are very informative and interesting.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-fatherland-of-apples/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/apples-of-eden-saving-the-wild-ancestor-of-modern-apples/

https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/i-went-to-the-fatherland-of-all-modern-apples

Kostas