Turkey Creek
5 year old buck +
Have your tried the North American Scion Exchange website for your remaining varieties?
Over the weekend, I got a chance to review my T-buds from last summer.
For regular apple trees from USDA GRIN or some of my own trees, it looks like close to 100% success. Of the 34 I inspected, looked like 1 was a failure and another that I could not see for sure if the two buds were good or not.
For columnar trees, my success is much lower. Of 31 rootstocks that I budded, 11 look good, 13 look bad or are clear failures, and 11 that might surprise me. On the plus side, those were the first I did and I felt that some of the budwood I took was probably not mature enough. The good news is it looks like I got at lease one new tree of each variety except for one.
Thanks. I have them as a request on my scionlist on the scion exchange's new forum website. I have not tried looking for them on the yahoo group but a search of the scionlists there got no hits for spire. I have enough stuff to get done that those can wait for next year when I have smaller want list.Have your tried the North American Scion Exchange website for your remaining varieties?
As for the mechanics of crossing, it is just about pollen. Take pollen from one tree's flowers and pollinate another tree's flowers and prevent bees from introducing other pollen. Harvest and grow the seeds to see which inherited the columnar genes and grow those until they fruit. I have selected a number of varieties with good scab and fireblight resistance to cross with columnar varieties. Eventually I will look at intentionally introducing pathogens to understand the disease resistance.