Chainsaw
Well-Known Member
Chummer, The blue birds are a pretty rare sighting for us here. And now a little more about the property and one of this years planned projects follows.
The tree above has hundreds of pounds of apples. The deer come to this tree as one of their first stops. It is a special tree but just another wild apple. Many apple trees can be special for deer hunters that have otherwise no commercial value because we of course have different needs than orchard people.
The property currently has about 35 acres of tillable land rented to a farmer, 12 acres setup as food plots, I acre houses our two 42 x 64 barns and there is a 1 acre daylily garden which houses just over 1,000 varieties of registered daylilies and thousands of unregistered daylily seedlings each of which is different from any other. A four acre piece is cleared and in the process of being fenced off for a second daylily garden near the barns. There is a one acre planted apple orchard fenced in with trees around ten years old and all producing very well. The balance of the six hundred and five acres is mostly wooded with the counted 2,000 plus released wild apple trees located in various areas throughout the woods and in hedgerows. A guesstimated 500 or more are yet to be released are also in the woods section. One of the major strong points on the property is the huge amount of apples and I am going to talk about them yet again. They are hands down a major draw in this neighborhood. Bear with me this will be a bit slow at first as it covers parts of what took me a few years to fully get it.
That is a picture of our daylily garden in peak bloom. The summer mornings go by quickly as I am in the daylily garden hybridizing daylilies every morning. That means I’m making crosses to produce seeds that will make better daylilies. What is a better daylily?
That is the million dollar question just as what is the better apple tree? The answer will be somewhat different for each of us. To me very loosely defined for now the better apple tree grows the biggest, produces the most browse and apples regularly, is winter hardy, disease resistant, and lives a long time. The taste of each apple is important as well but the tree is the most important. The deer here will eat all apples dropped; yes some apples will be eaten earlier in the fall than others but eventually they all get eaten. Diversity in tree and apple characteristics are a good thing though and something I want to encourage and maintain on this property.
With the daylily, I look for the same things-winter hardy, disease resistant, big plants strong branching with lots of blooms. The quality of the bloom like the apple is important but secondary to me. With the daylily as the apple a super plant cannot be multiplied in its EXACT form thru seeds. Both must be propagated vegetatively to produce a duplicate plant/tree. That does not mean though that we cannot make super plants/trees by planting seeds. We can’t consistently do it randomly though; we must stack the deck in our favor.
By crossing daylilies with great hardy plants proven to perform in my garden, that have great branching, and tons of blooms with each other, GUESS what. I got more of the same from the resultant seeds.
Hybridizing is very simple and does not have to be rocket science. Surely the more knowledge we have about the scientific whys of genes, chromosomes, what are diploids, tetraploids etc. and dominant/not dominant or recessive traits, Mendelian genetics and on and on the better off we are --maybe. Crossing great plants/trees to others that have both like characteristics and the characteristics we desire for future plants/trees will give us a higher percentage of better plants/trees than just random or natural crossing. Keeping good records of the outcomes of various crosses is paramount to success.
As with apples not all daylilies will successfully cross with one another; with wild trees there is no way of knowing without special tests except plain old trying it. Daylilies can be crossed to themselves; it brings out the more unusual recessive traits. Some apples can also be crossed with themselves as well. Again with wild trees we can determine what trees are cross compatible with each other simply by trying it and keeping perfect records of every cross accelerates our learning curves and significantly improves our results.
Okay so how would one cross apple trees? You simply take the pollen from your chosen great tree and cross it with another great chosen tree. Mark the flower, pick the resultant apple and collect and plant the seeds. The shortcoming I have with this procedure is I am a daylily hybridizer and not an apple hybridizer. So I will show how daylilies are pollinated and the same procedure can be applied to an apple. And yes I will be doing this to selected apple trees this spring.
So here is the same daylily picture again.
Look close at the bloom. You will see it has three red petals and three red sepals(smaller petals). Coming from its center the bloom also has six yellow/orange anthers and one white tipped pistol perched higher than the yellow anthers. The yellow/orange anthers are heavy with pollen. To cross the daylily one takes an anther from the selected daylily and touches it onto the end of the pistil of the other selected daylily. The pistil has a slightly sticky end and holds the pollen. You have now made a cross. Most will produce eight to twenty-four seeds and a very few are not fertile and will not produce seeds. Some are easy seed producers, some are not so prolific(one of the reasons for record keeping-to weed out or stop crossing with the not so prolific pollen sources/crosses). Additionally there are some restrictions in what pollen can be used on what trees/plants. I intend to identify those restrictions by simple trial and error.
This is all well and fine as it relates to crossing apple trees if the two apple trees you want to cross are in bloom simultaneously. If not though the cross can still be made. The procedure is simply to gather the pollen and place it in a plastic capsule and refrigerate it until needed. Daylily pollen can be kept for a week of so that way. If you want to keep it longer it can simply be frozen and can be good a long time even a year or more later. I'm hoping apple pollen has that same attribute.
So though we cannot produce clones of our favorite apple trees via seeds we can create apple trees from seeds with the characteristics we want. Note-I have not done this yet but I firmly believe it is a slam dunk for our situation and am looking forward to crossing apple trees this spring. By crossing the best trees on the property to each other over a few apple tree generations it will produce a pile of unique apple trees with genes already proven to perform above the norm in this environment and in this soil(best for now= similar strong points and absence of weak points). When I reached the point with the daylilies realizing that proven home grown worked out way better than buying plants from away that were touted as the "latest and the greatest" and most expensive, my hybridizing results really took shape quickly. Some of the plants from away probably were the "latest and the greatest" in their environment but many didn’t cut mustard here.
Realistically I am calling this a two generational project. It’s possible I will see the new apples of this property in my lifetime but the real peak would be during my son’s tenure here. And if I had grand children it could really advance to an unheard of level. So that’s one of my plans for this property and the next step of this project will be defining criteria for choosing which apple trees are worthy of acting as my stable of breeders as well as the scope of the project. Of the 1,000 plus purchased registered daylilies only a very few met my “stable” criteria. The rest fell short in some manner. Daylilies here only take around four years from cross to a full plant so some faults could be tolerated or reduced after multiple generations of crosses; the apple of course will take many years from cross to peak producing trees. Thus ideally only as perfect trees and from this area will be used as breeding stock for this project.
This project may not be the highest priority for this property nor the most productive use of time. I simply want to do it. And by providing not only the most apples in the area but the most, best from the perspective of my target audience-the deer in this area, it will be a another step in recreating the best deer woods around. And I must not forget the importance of DIVERSIFIED. A woods full of the same apple tree everywhere is not at all my goal here.
This project will be ongoing and chronicled here as it goes along and things are learned.
The tree above has hundreds of pounds of apples. The deer come to this tree as one of their first stops. It is a special tree but just another wild apple. Many apple trees can be special for deer hunters that have otherwise no commercial value because we of course have different needs than orchard people.
The property currently has about 35 acres of tillable land rented to a farmer, 12 acres setup as food plots, I acre houses our two 42 x 64 barns and there is a 1 acre daylily garden which houses just over 1,000 varieties of registered daylilies and thousands of unregistered daylily seedlings each of which is different from any other. A four acre piece is cleared and in the process of being fenced off for a second daylily garden near the barns. There is a one acre planted apple orchard fenced in with trees around ten years old and all producing very well. The balance of the six hundred and five acres is mostly wooded with the counted 2,000 plus released wild apple trees located in various areas throughout the woods and in hedgerows. A guesstimated 500 or more are yet to be released are also in the woods section. One of the major strong points on the property is the huge amount of apples and I am going to talk about them yet again. They are hands down a major draw in this neighborhood. Bear with me this will be a bit slow at first as it covers parts of what took me a few years to fully get it.
That is a picture of our daylily garden in peak bloom. The summer mornings go by quickly as I am in the daylily garden hybridizing daylilies every morning. That means I’m making crosses to produce seeds that will make better daylilies. What is a better daylily?
That is the million dollar question just as what is the better apple tree? The answer will be somewhat different for each of us. To me very loosely defined for now the better apple tree grows the biggest, produces the most browse and apples regularly, is winter hardy, disease resistant, and lives a long time. The taste of each apple is important as well but the tree is the most important. The deer here will eat all apples dropped; yes some apples will be eaten earlier in the fall than others but eventually they all get eaten. Diversity in tree and apple characteristics are a good thing though and something I want to encourage and maintain on this property.
With the daylily, I look for the same things-winter hardy, disease resistant, big plants strong branching with lots of blooms. The quality of the bloom like the apple is important but secondary to me. With the daylily as the apple a super plant cannot be multiplied in its EXACT form thru seeds. Both must be propagated vegetatively to produce a duplicate plant/tree. That does not mean though that we cannot make super plants/trees by planting seeds. We can’t consistently do it randomly though; we must stack the deck in our favor.
By crossing daylilies with great hardy plants proven to perform in my garden, that have great branching, and tons of blooms with each other, GUESS what. I got more of the same from the resultant seeds.
Hybridizing is very simple and does not have to be rocket science. Surely the more knowledge we have about the scientific whys of genes, chromosomes, what are diploids, tetraploids etc. and dominant/not dominant or recessive traits, Mendelian genetics and on and on the better off we are --maybe. Crossing great plants/trees to others that have both like characteristics and the characteristics we desire for future plants/trees will give us a higher percentage of better plants/trees than just random or natural crossing. Keeping good records of the outcomes of various crosses is paramount to success.
As with apples not all daylilies will successfully cross with one another; with wild trees there is no way of knowing without special tests except plain old trying it. Daylilies can be crossed to themselves; it brings out the more unusual recessive traits. Some apples can also be crossed with themselves as well. Again with wild trees we can determine what trees are cross compatible with each other simply by trying it and keeping perfect records of every cross accelerates our learning curves and significantly improves our results.
Okay so how would one cross apple trees? You simply take the pollen from your chosen great tree and cross it with another great chosen tree. Mark the flower, pick the resultant apple and collect and plant the seeds. The shortcoming I have with this procedure is I am a daylily hybridizer and not an apple hybridizer. So I will show how daylilies are pollinated and the same procedure can be applied to an apple. And yes I will be doing this to selected apple trees this spring.
So here is the same daylily picture again.
Look close at the bloom. You will see it has three red petals and three red sepals(smaller petals). Coming from its center the bloom also has six yellow/orange anthers and one white tipped pistol perched higher than the yellow anthers. The yellow/orange anthers are heavy with pollen. To cross the daylily one takes an anther from the selected daylily and touches it onto the end of the pistil of the other selected daylily. The pistil has a slightly sticky end and holds the pollen. You have now made a cross. Most will produce eight to twenty-four seeds and a very few are not fertile and will not produce seeds. Some are easy seed producers, some are not so prolific(one of the reasons for record keeping-to weed out or stop crossing with the not so prolific pollen sources/crosses). Additionally there are some restrictions in what pollen can be used on what trees/plants. I intend to identify those restrictions by simple trial and error.
This is all well and fine as it relates to crossing apple trees if the two apple trees you want to cross are in bloom simultaneously. If not though the cross can still be made. The procedure is simply to gather the pollen and place it in a plastic capsule and refrigerate it until needed. Daylily pollen can be kept for a week of so that way. If you want to keep it longer it can simply be frozen and can be good a long time even a year or more later. I'm hoping apple pollen has that same attribute.
So though we cannot produce clones of our favorite apple trees via seeds we can create apple trees from seeds with the characteristics we want. Note-I have not done this yet but I firmly believe it is a slam dunk for our situation and am looking forward to crossing apple trees this spring. By crossing the best trees on the property to each other over a few apple tree generations it will produce a pile of unique apple trees with genes already proven to perform above the norm in this environment and in this soil(best for now= similar strong points and absence of weak points). When I reached the point with the daylilies realizing that proven home grown worked out way better than buying plants from away that were touted as the "latest and the greatest" and most expensive, my hybridizing results really took shape quickly. Some of the plants from away probably were the "latest and the greatest" in their environment but many didn’t cut mustard here.
Realistically I am calling this a two generational project. It’s possible I will see the new apples of this property in my lifetime but the real peak would be during my son’s tenure here. And if I had grand children it could really advance to an unheard of level. So that’s one of my plans for this property and the next step of this project will be defining criteria for choosing which apple trees are worthy of acting as my stable of breeders as well as the scope of the project. Of the 1,000 plus purchased registered daylilies only a very few met my “stable” criteria. The rest fell short in some manner. Daylilies here only take around four years from cross to a full plant so some faults could be tolerated or reduced after multiple generations of crosses; the apple of course will take many years from cross to peak producing trees. Thus ideally only as perfect trees and from this area will be used as breeding stock for this project.
This project may not be the highest priority for this property nor the most productive use of time. I simply want to do it. And by providing not only the most apples in the area but the most, best from the perspective of my target audience-the deer in this area, it will be a another step in recreating the best deer woods around. And I must not forget the importance of DIVERSIFIED. A woods full of the same apple tree everywhere is not at all my goal here.
This project will be ongoing and chronicled here as it goes along and things are learned.
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Cool stuff.
