I've been preaching this for years. The same is true for trees in general. Smaller IS better!

Applenut:

I have long been a fan of planting smaller trees like one-year whips over larger trees and especially potted or rootballed trees. But I have never heard of growth rates such as the ones you report on your newly planted trees. Here, only weeds can grow 8 feet tall in one season. That's California for you.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don:

I'll post late March and early September photos to show the progress (stinging nettles also have that growth rate around here, and rest assured our local mountians can easily supply the rest of the country should terrorists wipe out the rest of the stinging nettles).

I will say it presents a bit of a problem; I planted 50 in the ground intending to dig them up this winter and sell them as bare root. Now it looks like I'm going to need a backhoe to get them out!

I train all the young trees on 5' bamboo sticks. The champion "sprinter" for height is Lady, but it is just a single whip going straight up. However one Grimes Golden is trained on a 10' conduit that not only is growing straight up 7-1/2 feet, but has branched out to the point that the lower branches are 3' long and are making it hard to get down the row.

Applenut

OK, I'm putting my feeble HTML skills to the test to see if I can post before and after photos.

{{gwi:124253}}
March of 2006 The trees with the bamboo sticks are in the ground, the rest are in pots.

{{gwi:124254}}Same trees in Sept. 2006. The metal conduits hanging from the wires are 9' tall.

{{gwi:124255}}
Branch structure of the center tallest tree.

{{gwi:124256}}These were also planted as benchgrafts in March 2006.

Applenut

Wow......were you giving the things steroids or something? Thats very encouraging to me,because Im most likely going to have to get a lot of benchgrafts due to the lack of one year old wip varieties at the nursery Im looking at.I hope I get half that much growth from my benchgrafts in one season.

I didn't give them anything- just planted them in the dirt and mulched on top.

The photos are back in September. They're a foot taller now and still going strong (we don't lose the leaves until the end of December; some never lose them at all and the old leaves are pushed out by the new ones).

I'm actually a bit concerned; I have to move some of them, and they're going to be a bear to dig up. I may have to have a backhoe do it when I get some work done. A word to the wise- plant them where they're going to stay!

I'd take a benchgraft over a whip anyday. The whip has it roots decimated when they dig it up. Your season isn't as long as ours, but you still should get some good growth.

Applenut

It's odd. When I've planted rootstock and then grafted scions to it, I've had exactly the opposite experience -- very slow growth, especially in the first year. Maybe it's the rootstock I'm buying. I've bought from One Green World, Raintree and (before it closed) Sonoma Antique. It's the same experience every time. The rootstock arrives with roots that are barely visible -- just a few wisps. Some survive, some die. I've got a tree that was planted as rootstock two years ago. I grafted a scion to it and the graft took, but the tree is still puny, maybe 2 1/2 feet tall. Others just never grow out. Where are you getting your rootstock?

Nimzo

I am very interested in your project here. You say you didn't give them anything? No miracle grow in the drip irrigation system.? What type of potting material did you use?

Now I am going to go read up on bench grafting. I have baby pear trees I am wanting to graft onto.. I have never grafted anything by myself and thought whip grafting would be the easiest to try first.

Nimzo-

The rootstocks you got are trash. I ordered some from Raintree last year and they were these skinny, whispy things with a few hair-like roots.

The Bud 9 rootstocks I get from an Oregon wholesale grower (commercial quantities only) are thick as my finger and have a veritable mop of roots on the end. I mistook them for M111 when I first saw them. They whooped the daylights out of the Raintree ones.

I have no doubt that a tree with scrawny roots, whether bought bare-root at a home center or rootstocks from a mail-order nursery, will spend the first few years trying to re-grow those roots back, and will die in hot weather half the time. You're better off growing your own apple rootstock from seed than buying scrawny rootstock. Get the seeds out of Pink Lady apples around April, as the seeds are starting to sprout inside the apple by then and are easy to grow in a 5-gallon pot of straight dirt.

The trees you see in pots are potted in plain dirt left over from digging the foundation to our house addition. The ones in the ground were planted in plain dirt also, no amendments. They are both irrigated with straight city tap water.

The only fertilizer is the mulch around the base of the tree, consisting of shredded leaves or bark.

Our house at one time was a black walnut orchard around 1925, but I don't think any fertilizer was left in the ground. However this is citrus orchard country, and the soil is good and deep. Other than that, I can give no explanation other than our long season and starting with good roots.

Applenut

I've never had a small tree overtake a properly planted larger one.

Rootstock quality does vary hugely. I order much of my rootstock from Raintree and have gotten both great stuff and scrawny stuff from them. It also matters in terms of graft success, wimpy stock has less energy and so may not be able to push the scion. My best grafts were on rootstocks I had planted a year or two before, those will give me the 6' tree in one year. But never from a purchased rootstock.

Scott

Hi Scootfsmith,

This is really exciting. How do you plant a rootstock? Where do you get the seedlings? Maybe this is beyond what a rookie should ask.

Btw, my wife and I were really inspired by your picture and we just ordered a few more trees. We used to plant them 15/20 feet apart. Now want to be do them closer with regular pruning.

thanks a lot for your input to the forum.

njrookie

Wow. Impressive.

Applenut. Would you happen to have any pictures of the roots? A few pictures that could illustrate the root structure differences in the bare root, benchgrafts, and potted apples (or just from the benchgrafts)? thanks.