Growing apples and other plants from seeds - my tips and reviews
Plants from seeds. Where to begin?
Where to take planting material? Is it worth buying seedlings? Where and when to plant selected seeds? How do I get vaccinated? The answers to these questions are given by life itself, it is only necessary to notice the tips of nature and take them into service.
Ruthless selection of seeds
I read your article "Two ways of stratification," which ended with the following conclusion: "Buy seedlings in the nursery and do not try, do not strain like me."
Basically, I agree with the author. She herself bought apple trees twice in the nursery when he was still in Petrovsk.
But ... In 1955, instead of the desired saffron Pepin, I received, as it later turned out during fruiting, Anis (apparently gray). An old man is still alive ... And much later, when we didn’t have a nursery, they brought me a Berkutovskaya apple tree instead of the Rossoshanskaya apple from another. A good grade, but with a bunch of flaws.
And further. Well, if the nursery is close, but if far and your car is not? In the neighboring market (near) it is easiest to buy a pig in a poke. You have repeatedly said this. Of course, the cultivation of fruit plants from seeds requires patience, labor and time - I judge from my own experience.
See also: Propagation of plants with cuttings and seeds (part 2)
Where to start?
Visit friends (and sometimes unfamiliar) gardeners, admire their apple trees, choose what you like in appearance (color, size of fruit, crown size, yield). I hope that you will give and taste apples. Wait for the full ripeness of apples and take out, it is better to immediately from several seeds.
They should be brown, mature. Here you will make the first selection, take the largest, full-weight. They must be stratified, i.e. to operate at low temperatures.
In nature it's just finding fallen apples in the fall on the ground already in winter, under snow, under fallen leaves. Therefore, you can:
- just prikopat seeds immediately in the right place in the earth;
- place in a box in moist sand and put it in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator, not forgetting to regularly check;
- bury in the autumn in the ground, marking a place with a pole and protecting it from mice.
The stratification term for apple trees is about 90 days. In the spring from the box, the seeds that have bent must be planted in the garden. And already by the fall of your year-old twigs grew. And here you have to ruthlessly conduct the second selection - choose from all the sprouts the strongest, plump, with large leaves: those in which the leaves are small, usually give then small fruits.
Once upon a time I bought on the market southern Crimean apples and, taking from one tasty large apple seeds, sowed them directly into the ground. Later, seedlings with small leaves gave sweet, but small apples, a little more than ordinary chinese. Pereprivit by youth did not guess.
If you have several plants grown, you will have to conduct a third selection - by the quality of the fruits. Yes, you have to wait a few years, but even ordinary apple trees bought in the nursery also do not immediately bear fruit!
I had a lucky apple tree from someone who had thrown a stub, I didn’t plant it myself, I just left a small plant accidentally discovered. She gave autumn light yellow fruits - very juicy and tasty.
And the neighbor from the abandoned sticks had four apple-trees, one of them did not like the neighbor's taste of her fruit, and she persuaded me to get a vaccine from my apple tree, which I did, to her delight.
So, even if the result of the experiment was not liked, there is always a way out - vaccination. I, having no experience yet, vaccinated in spring with a shank for the bark, and recently it has been described in detail here how to do vaccinations in the split. Twice, plums from the seeds themselves grew in me, but both turned out to be self-infertile, but there are no plums in the district.
Perfectly cherry grows from seeds - simply from abandoned seeds; and bears fruit normally if you have two bushes or more (after 3-4 years).
Sickle on a straw Somehow I got caught in a note about chopping hay or straw with the help of a braid. I'll tell you about chopping straw with a sickle.
For a long time, in the war, we had a cow that saved two families from starvation. Semi-krovka-simmentalka gave a lot of milk, fed us, and we also donated milk or butter to the dairy at the expense of the animal tax (was then such). Milk was sold in the market, and the money went to buy hay.
But it was not always enough, and then it was necessary to give the drill a chopped straw, steamed with boiling water and sprinkled with bran or steamed sunflower meal.
The straw was cut like this: in the plank door of the barn, a narrow vertical hole was cut at a level convenient for work. The size of the hole corresponded to the largest width of the sickle blade. From the inside of the barn, a sickle was inserted into the hole with the blade out. Whether there was any kind of fastening inside - I do not know, the memory did not preserve.
Outside, bunches of straw were cut into pieces and thrown into a large basket. The size of the segments I do not remember, then I was 9-12 years old. I think that only one person managed with sharpness - mother. After work, in order to avoid accidental injuries, the sickle was removed and cleaned until the next time.
Maybe this way of preparing straw for livestock feeding is used by someone now, and maybe someone will come in handy in the future. True, there are very few cows now, but it will not always be so.
I wish the readers health and success in hard work!
See also: Propagation of plants with cuttings and seeds (part 3)
Apple tree from seeds - video
© Author: Nina Viktorovna LIK.
Below other entries on the topic "Dacha and garden - with their own hands"
- Peach and yoshta - growing in the central and northern regions
- Growing apples and other plants from seeds - my tips and reviews
- Onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers - tips and memories
- How to quickly warm up a country house - tips from readers
- Orchard in Siberia - 6 main rules
- On the cultivation of walnuts in the middle lane
- Seedlings and its transplant into the ground - summer residents share their experiences
- Pumpkins on piles and in pits
- Cultivation of potatoes in the heat - varieties and care. Mini tubers.
- How did I learn tulips garlic
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An apple tree from a seed rose to fame
I want to share useful experience with gardeners by talking about how I 10 back grown a gorgeous apple tree from a seed.
Autumn was in the yard, a car with apples — beautiful, juicy and tasty — came from somewhere to our market. I bought, I began to try. Suddenly I see: but inside, all the seeds hatch.
I had to go to the garden and dig up the ground. He planted a row of seeds in it, noted the place of planting on two sides with chopsticks. I arrive at the cottage in the spring, and all the seedlings came together amicably, one to one. They sat summer, grew by 30 cm, the ground was soft, fertilized. In the fall, seedlings were planted, the extra distributed to relatives and neighbors in the country. For two years, the apple trees have grown well, have not hurt anything.
It was still winter, and in the spring I began to use a simple technique, which causes the young tree to activate sap flow, contributes to its enhanced growth. I took the aluminum wire, stepped back from the ground about 30-40 cm and twisted the trunk of the apple tree with this wire. It did not turn out very tight, because he acted only with his hand, trying, however, so that this “winding” would not fall off. This should be done in early May.
Over the summer, the apple tree grew, its trunk became thicker, the wire almost grew into it. At this moment (somewhere in August) it must be removed.
The next year I didn’t have any apples, and a year later my apple tree blossomed. She had grown up by that time powerful, one could not wait for such a nursery, the branches were sprawling, strong - and there was nothing to cut. They grow so that they do not interfere with each other - both up and in breadth.
I did not pick the color, there weren’t so many of them, and the tree was powerful. The apples were green in the summer. In the mass of foliage they were almost invisible, but by autumn they began to turn red. They sit tight, do not fall. I tried the most mature one - dark green with a dark red barrel. Juicy, strong, sweet and sour taste. The variety turned out to be autumn, and even better than "mother". As a result, in a hurry, in the first year I gathered about three buckets of apples. Thanks to the apple tree! Dear gardeners, good luck, try, dare, experiment, it is so cool to grow a powerful tree from a seed! Attaching photo.