ornamental crabapple/apple tree

RobertT

Yearling... With promise
This tree was originally an ornamental crabapple tree. Rabbits girdled the tree the first and winter and it broke off at the base. Well for no good reason we mowed around it and now have a very unique tree. It has come back from the roots and is part ornamental and part apple.

My questions are would the seeds from the apples be true to the original rootstock?
Can I graft known varieties to the ornamental part?
I have attached pictures hopefully you can see them.
 

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IMG_8774.JPG You never know what you get when growing apples from seed. One half of the genetics are from pollen which is from an unknown source.

I have a few dolgos that I grew from seed that resemble grafted dolgos and a couple out of that batch of seed have IMG_8775.JPG ornamental crab tendencies.


The above two pictures are of crab apples grown from seed from the same tree and collected at the same time. The mother tree was a wild tree and not a grafted dolgo.
 
I gave this tree to a friend as a seedling. Seed came from a grafted dolgo and it looks like the apple will resemble a dolgo. A few other trees from this batch of seed do show the red splendor tendency. This is a cell phone picture and the quality is not great.

1406335194385.jpg

I do not think there is a bad crab apple as long as it produces fruit. Deer, turkey, grouse, or other birds will use it.
 
I have several hundred red splendor Crabs that were planted as part of my CRP planting. They were planted primarily for pheasants but the deer heavily browse them. With the crabs several hundred American plums were planted which the deer prefer to browse over the crabs. Both are very low maintenance and grow fairly rapid and once the roots are established send out suckers as they are browsed. Most of my trees are on their 4th year and are 10 feet tall.

I give very high marks to both varieties.
 
FB-Are the plums starting to form thickets or are they browsed back to heavily?

Have you tried a large exclosure to try and grow a thicket?
 
Some individual plants are thicker then others but the plan is to enclose areas and try and encourage thickets to form. I have two areas specifically picked out that I should try and enclose. Like anything, it will take a number of years to get them established. Somewhere I read how to stimulate trees to sucker but I need to find it. If I remember right I Need to disturb the roots some. How else can I stimulate suckering?
 
I think someone (Turkey Creek?) had posted on the dark side that a light disking would stimulate suckering of plums.

You could probably even take a shovel and make a few cuts around a few of the plums. I find that some of my apple rootstocks sucker 3-15 feet away from the trunk. I have moved some of those suckers.

Will you thickets be a continuous thicket or more of a circle with an opening in the middle? My tennis racket plan is a struggle with the reed canary. A few of the willows are now waist high. I should have used sandbar willow.
 
The two I am thinking of are just a large area I want full of shrubs so the deer can hide in them. I have not thought about an area in the middle that is open but with my spacing I will have openings for awhile. It's hard as a remote owner to get to elaborate.
 
Yes it was me. If you can get a tiller in there just do a light tilling, probably give the parent plant a little buffer area, wouldnt want to have someone kill their plum! I moved some dead trees a couple springs ago and where I scalped the ground with the bucket plum suckers popped up if they were near plum bushes.

Here when farmers do field work, plums that are on field edges will develop a number of suckers in the fields. Granted these are well established plums, but I can see no reason it wouldnt work on younger plums that are old enough to have developed a decent root system.
 
An old picture that I know Jerry has seen before, but disturbed roots also cause suckering of crab apples.IMG_7281 2.jpg
 
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