Hastening the Fruiting of Apple Seedlings1

Abstract

Abstract An analysis of the initial fruiting in nearly 50,000 apple seedlings grown over a 29-year period showed that 12% had fruited by their 8th year from seed. For 18 carefully studied crosses, 82% of the seedlings had flowered by their 11th year. Parent cultivars producing the most precocious progenies were ‘Fyan’, ‘Haralson’, ‘Red Melba’, ‘Golden Delicious’, and ‘Idared’. Early fruiting of seedlings was enhanced by large seedling size and wide spacing in the row, but season of transplanting had no significant effect. Fruiting of apple seedlings was hastened by 2 methods of trunk ringing: scoring with a knife or saw and spraying trunks with 2- sec -butyl-4,6-dinitrophenol (Dow General). Ringing caused precocious bearing in 4-year-old seedlings but 3-year-old seedlings were too young to be stimulated by ringing and a large portion of 5-year-old seedlings bore without ringing. Seedling fruiting was advanced about 1¼ years by grafting onto established 10-year-old trees having M.IX roots. This small advance was not enough to justify the considerable effort required to do the grafting. The presence of a fruiting branch of the stock tree did not hasten fruiting of seedling scions grafted onto the stock tree.