It would be nice if some others would post some pics and updates on their seedling "stuff". I will post some pics of some other seedling trees I have growing here. I have lots of space so there are various seedlings of peach, plum apricot, apple etc. A good number produce fantastic fruit while others not so fantastic, but in any event they have proven to be hardy here so they get to stay:) I encourage anyone with the room and patience to grow some seed out.....you may stumble on a real gem! I posted a link of a thread from a couple of years ago. They produced some fantastic fruit again last year and hoping for some again this year. It was a real test winter this year, really long cold then big warm up then really cold .......still really cold now! http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/fruit/msg0820041119336.html

I find them year round more or less. Early spring I find the best time to dig them out, they are big enough to be able to track down but most of the damage has not happened yet. This spring I microwaved tanglefoot to get it fluid and painted it directly on the lower 6" of my trunks, to the ground level. I haven't seen a borer since then. Note I dug out 20-30 of them by hand before this treatment. I also treated only 5-year and older trees, the younger ones I used tangle trap instead (less caustic). Scott

The modern take on bottom soil as far as I can tell is that it often leads to excessive vigor. Comes down to the old balancing act of fruit production- too much vigor, and you get poorly colored and flavored fruit- too little and the trees are short-lived and production poor with small fruit. Guess you could call it the Goldylocks syndrome. In the west, you can get a handle on it just by controlling water, but after 20 years of growing fruit in the east I am still struggeling to come up with the right balance. I came to fruit trees through vegetables, so I went for too much vigor for the first 10 years. First, too much compost than too much mulch! Dwarfing rootstock certainly seems to simplify this dance with apples. M 26 is harder to excessively juice in my experience than more vigorous ones. Soil texture is as important as soil depth, of course. As I've said before on this forum, I actually prefer a sandy soil- you can usually add water in a home orchard if it's needed, but you can't easily reduce it.

Wow, Dan-great fig info, thanks(always good to have a way to tell if it is a great fig)! Ok, Tim- your celeste is purple/blue blushed, do you mean just a touch of blue or purple, or dark purple, so mainly tan then?, I have a feeling next year I will be making a lot of name this fig posts. Are there different variants of celeste that ripen diffferent colors(some tan, some purple/blue blush, and some dark, like my recent fruit, almost black? Thanks again, Carrie