Ancient apple trees

My family owns woods in upstate ny and deep in the woids is an old apple orcharid ( johnny appleseed?). And some still produce apples trees. I was wondering if there is any market for old crab apple tree seeds?

the seeds probably not. however if the trees produce fruits that have desirable qualities it might be worth while to graft some of them onto new root stock then plant them closer to home.

we have 3 very old apple trees, one of them is in our woods, and hopefully this year we will find out what kind of apples are on it, as we had killing frosts so it hasn't born since we discovered it. We have cleared a lot of the shading trees around it recently and have cleaned up around the base so we can get to the apples when they bear. We do know the apples are RED as we saw some at the very top that we couldn't get to the year we found the tree, but since we haven't had bearing weather..this year we should have.

nothing wrong with leaving the apples in the woods and cleaning up dead branches and opening them up to some sunshine..if you are able to get to them to harvest them..and also you can graft other good apple varieties on them if scion wood is available to you.

Apple do tend to do OK in woods as long as they aren't overly shaded..they do need sun to get fruit..so keeping a small area around them clear will be helpful.

Our other two ancient trees are in the open..

Laura, Maybe someone like these folks would like to have some of the seed to grow.

http://www.treesofantiquity.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=10

If you ever end up with any extra seed I would love to have some to try and grow in Wyoming.

Miles, apples are diploid, meaning they need two trees to pollinate the flowers, the resulting fruit is a combination of the two trees genetics so when you plant an apple seed the resulting tree's fruit will have some combination of the two "parent" trees characteristics. There are more than three thousand recognized varieties of apples , most of which were originally open pollinated in this way, all apple trees that produce true to type are grafted trees which use scion wood from a donor tree. The root stock used for grafts determines the mature size of the tree. While a tree grown from seed may produce crisp, juicy, sweet, wonderful apples it may also produce fruit which is mealy, mushy, with poor flavor or is prone to disease, and since it takes several years for a tree to produce a crop it just makes sense to grow grafted trees so you know what you will end up with. That said, if you have a lot of unused ground and a few years to wait, grow some trees from seed, you never know you might end up with a superior apple and if you don't you can always feed them to livestock or use the wood to smoke meat.

Thanks Scott, I have ten acres that I am throwing seeds from all sorts of fruit onto. Just to see if I can get some fruit. One big experiment!

Laura,
I wonder if they might be cider apples instead of eating apples!

I would highly encourage you to plant apples from seeds..we have had more than a dozen apple trees grow from discarded apples here and all of them were wonderful, edible apples..so don't let those discourage you that would say not to try...please.

Unfortuantely when we had our housefire some of the old apple trees ..and unfortunately some of the best I've eaten, had to be removed for the new house..but honestly they were wonderful, I still have 3 of the old trees bearing that are all different and all lovely..and I miss the ones that had to go.

grafting is a good idea!