My recent research into fruit trees has allowed me to know that you can get trees that fruit in different mounths of the summer. That is, an apple whose fruit ripens in July another in August another in September and another in October and another that ripens late and keeps till April when you can start eating your rhubarb. The same goes for pears some ripen late but are hard and uneatable till they have been stored for a while. You can have peaches and plums all fruit i sppose with fruit that ripen in each mounths of the summer one variety in one mounth and another in another if you chose the trees well, and figs that have a breva or breba crop, that is the figs of last year that never got very far, ripening the next year so you can look out for early ripening figs tree species as well as the ones that ripen as normal in September.
If you wanted to get this sort of usefull spread of fruit maturing times or want to have apples of your prefered flavour, you would have to plant an awfull lot of seed to find yourself with fruit that ripened in different mouths and had the flavour you liked because the trees don't come true to type from seed. That is an enormouse disadvantage to growing from seed.
I read a better idea for having a fruit tree growing on its own
roots than growing it from seed that is to grow it from a cutting. I don't know how difficult that is but i came across one nursery that does this while I was looking up fruit trees, the Orange Pippin nursery. Having trees growing on their own root being one reason for growing trees from seed.
I read one scientific paper on roots that said that fruit trees have
deep roots, it did not expand on this though. I wonder if the reason some examples have shallow ones is that we
feed them and
water them so well that growing deep roots is a bit beside the point for them. Darrel Doherty says that the grass of one farmers
land was not making top soil to any great depth because it received too much good cow manure to grow roots to any great depth.
Trees do grow sinker roots, that grow right down like tap roots they don't usually have many sinker roots but can have a few, so though you have cut through their tap root to
sell them, bought ones are capable of growing new deep roots.
Another reason to have trees grown from seed would be to have a bigger genetic bank of fruit trees. If each
apple tree is grown from injerto of an apple tree of the sort you like or from trees that have been njerted with that tree, then all those trees have the same genes which makes them more liable to being carried off by something like the graffiosis of elm trees. I read once that elm trees were usually grown from sucker of one tree and all elms in one county would originate from the same parent tree which would mean that elms had very few genetic differences and be less likely to find a way to survive disease.
If you buy lots of types of apple trees and crab apples to polinate them the you will have an enormouse gene banks and the seeds of your apples will be more likely to produce interesting new varieties. Ditto other types of fruit tree. agri
rose macaskie.
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