You recognize the name (good).
I recognize her. 😆

Ny parents always tell me I was born 30 years to late... concidering i listin only their type of music ( pink floyd, alice cooper, zeppelin , black sabbath etc)

:thumbleft: :thumbleft: :thumbleft:

I have one brugmensia seedling now!!! mabey 30 more to go!

2 brug seedlings have sprouted ( out of 6 splanted)

I checked the stratifying seeds, all the macintosh apple seeds sprouted, some had alredy gone green. I planted the 2 seeds that had small roots, and put them in som,e sun. Peach seeds had mould, tossed. Same with my lily seeds.

My almond has 13 fully formed leaves, with about 4 growin in various stages. Its cool how they twist when they unfurl....

Gonna stratify my passiflora seeds tomorrow, and plant my orange, and trachy seeds.

i have some genovese basil, and tyme are well grown, in the aerogarden, going to be planted outside.

I have quite a few pommegranate seedlings, the best one is already on its 3rd set ( also in the aerogarden). Going to be moved out doors after frost ( ive read many posts and info regarding pommagranate hardiness, lots have had good growth in zone 5, but no flowers.)

The macintosh apple seeds sprouting tells me spring is comming 😈 😈 😈 😈 😈

How long are you going to keep some of your seedlings in pots before you plant them?

John

I think your "palm edition"should look like this-

50 Washy F seeds im waiting on. Im quite sure, I will have some palms this year, either some form of trachy Fortunei, or trachy nanus, sabal minor, or a washy.
I do not know hwo things have faired this year. Due to the deep snow, and multching ive done, i should have some great success!!!!!!

Washingtonia filerfa

Seeds im waiting on:
Trachy ( nanus, naini tal, fortune), sabal minor, date,

I trimmed it down a bit 😉

But, im also usin this to ask questions and talk about it, since ill have lots of questions. I dont wanna swamp the board, so id rather post it all here.

its palm edition becasue the palms are going to be one of the major parts of it, even if it seems to be drowned out by other things. Not to mention they are the plants that are really pushing the limits here......

I moved this to a new section that's related to the contents of this post.

Thanks jay...

You're very welcome. 🙂

macintosh apple seeds sprouting

We used to have a commercial apple orchard ~1100 trees, McIntosh and Spartans mostly.
All stock was grafted to certain rootstocks.
The Mc (or Spartan) canopies were grafted to Transparent (the variety) interstock which was then grafted to super-hardy Antonovka roots.

A sprouted apple seedling won't be true to parentage, generally always small and sickly.

Where are the trees now?
Firewood, none finer than 3-year stacked applewood.

Barb

My family in quebec, sell syrup and honey and apples. THey used to have a much bigger orchard, but it seems everyone is moving to wine, in that region. Sounds like they did that in BC too. IS there a certain reason? ( sounds like im talking to the right person 😀 ) **** there are quite a few mcintosh apple trees here, especialy in my area.

ID like to take the risk. If worse comes to worse it will be a good polinator for anpother apple tree. I know id have to get 2 (80% of the time depending on species) if i hope to get any apples. Im thinking of getting a "honeycrisp" apple as the secondary tree, or as an experiment, possibly try to graph a few other branches on that tree. Thats probably the best way, seeing as I dont have much space.

I was looking up some hardy trees, and most information reccomented a standard tree in my area. Most graphted apple trees have a hard time here apperantly ( except if they are graphted onto crabapple stocks, which is apperantly how they do it here)..

I couldnt cut down that many trees 😯 My inner hippie wont let me LOL. Although they would brobably make some wicked woodchips for smoking 😀

IS there a certain reason?

In our case, labour became more and more iffy.
Locals weren't interested in picking apples, even on smaller trees that required little ladder work, so we relied on transients to show up year after year.
That dwindled over the years, as well as what packinghouses would pay per pound.
Farmers simply couldn't pay an hourly late to pickers, so it was per bin, because time was of the essence.
Once fruit was ready, it had to be in bins and ready to ship within about a week, or else stored in a cooler to they don't dry up and become unmarketable.
Increasingly, farmers make less than the middleman who simply buys and sells the stuff without having ever seen the product 👿
And retail stores want profit too.

Then there was weather: hail and windstorms, in some years, affected 80% of the crop, rendering apples fit only for juice not the fresh market.
And juice apples didn't even pay pickers' wages. We had crop insurance that would pay in case of hail, giving us some income, but there was the associated premium to pay annually, too!

We also didn't like the necessary application of pesticides...Guthion is the stinky scary one I remember.
So why spray at all? Tough question. A case of you're buggered if you do, and you're buggered if you don't.
Think of a consumer at Safeway spending $1.29 / lb. for apples...they're not going to select any with marks on them. At that price, they want clean/unblemished fruit. So we had to spray for thrips, aphids, codling moth (the "wormy" apples pest...and no, worms weren't the size of earthworms, ha ha...they were very tiny but tunneled in apple flesh), and other bugs I've now forgotten.

As to moving to wine, we considered it, but the orchard renovation would've required considerable costs and labour replanting new stock with trellising, etc.
You get to a point in your life where off-premises jobs pay, and on-premises farming doesn't, so it was an easy choice for us. But folks who do change over are following market trends...estate wineries are tied with tourism marketing, and do very well if they include restaurants and sampling rooms, especially if located on a tourbus route.

As to pollinators...2 types of apple.
You're correct, but I have to laugh, remembering a Horticulturist's instructions when we were planning orchard layout.
We had chosen McIntosh apples as the crop, and he said to order Spartans for pollination. So we did, and Spartans (if I remember accurately) were interspersed every 8th tree, every 3rd row. What the Hort guy didn't tell us--or didn't know-- 😆 was that Spartans king blossom (the big one in middle) opened five days LATER than McIntosh king blossom. 😕 Pollination in our orchard was a result of the numerous wild bees that seemed to appear out of nowhere at blossom time. Wild bees were the workhorses at our place...the Spartans not so much. Never saw that Hort guy again. 😉

So there it is: more than you ever wanted to know about orcharding 😆 😆

We never did any grafting ourselves, ordered specific stock requirements that were grafted at commercial orchard nursery. But an old Ukrainian neighbour did his own grafting...he had one apple tree that had a different apple variety on every branch. Beautiful at blossom time, pinkish blossoms on some branches, white on others. Stunning! I've seen Grafting course available through the government Agriculture department, but never attended myself.

Re smoking wood...a man arrived one day, wanting apple wood for smoking fish. We gave him some firewood hunks and he was thrilled.
...seems he was going to come back with some smoked fish. Hmmm. 🙄

It's always fun to grow something as a family food supply and/or hobby.
But once you ramp up into "real farming", it's a whole different ball of wax requiring unbelievable levels of knowledge and skill, not to mention expensive equipment.

Oh my goodness...my post is an insomnia cure!
Barb

LOL wow this post got lost....

I now have soem washys growing, still waitin on some others.

The apple seedlings are already showing variation.. One is taller with less leaves, while the shorter one has more. Even the leaf seration looks different.

Lots of the snow has melted so I can give some updates on somethings. The wisteria, wegelia, all 3 clematis survived the winter. The 3 bamboos ive mentioned in my other post, but I will add, that my pseudosasa Japonica, is uncovered, and other then slight yellowing its perfect. Absolutly perfect. My hibiscus had 2 seeds that stayed on the plant, so I planted those.

My Yucca Filamentosa, is alive. Almost 100% so far. No marks on the leaves or anything. I also unvoveres what i could of the passiflora. ALmost all the cives were hollow and blond, except 5 !! Some of the vines were still light green to very green the closer to the ground. The roots should be fully intact. Im hoping for it to make an apperance this year ( although late, end of june probably).

Ive planted my lobelia, some brocoli. The brugs are doing well, my cobea came up, same with my rosemary and the cyperus glabor. STarting peppers next week, and the first sowing of letuce and spinach a week or so after that. From then on, weekly sowing inside and out. Spring is awsome!.

And, I bought a grape vine today. Since the Himrod Grape failed worse then Oprah on a diet last year, I managed to buy one thats budding. All the other ones had one bud, and dead top growth. This one was the best, with 5 noticable healty buds. Its in my unheated basement in bright light untill I can get it in the ground in 6 - 8 weeks.