Hillside Garden in Winter
The rain stopped and the wind subsided and so it was that I planted the last two apple trees in the Hillside Garden today. Planting them, of course, was the easy part. Dig a hole, cover the roots with earth in accordance with the instructions provided, water them, mulch them and stake them. The hard part was protecting them from the deer. Those little $%#&$%@ love everything about an apple tree, including bark, leaves, and fruit. That meant building a circular fence, 5 feet in height, around each tree to keep their pointy little heads at bay. Anyhow, it's done, leaving the garden with a slight resemblance to a minimum security prison, but designed to keep the inmates (outmates, actually, if you think about it) out rather than inmates in. Now all I can do is read the seed catalogs and wait for spring.
The garden presently includes the four apples trees (Malus domestica), an untold number of blackberry briers (Rubus allegheniensis) and four wild grape vines (Vitis reparia) as perennials.
The varieties of apples (Carolina Red June, Virginia Beauty, Magnum Bonum, and Black Limbertwig) in the Hillside Garden are but four of about 7500 named varieties worldwide! Apple trees of the same variety will not pollinate one another and that's why an apple orchard must always have at least two varities of apple trees. Yet, when the pollen from, say, a Magnum Bonum pollinates a Virginia Beauty, the resulting apple seeds are a Magnum Bonum-Virginia Beauty hybrid. (The fruit itself, in this case, is always a Virginia Beauty, regardless of the variety of pollen.) Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but you would need to plant the seed and wait 8 or 10 years for a tree from that seed to bear fruit to know whether it's a good hybrid. Accordingly, that's why the various varieties of apple trees are usually propagated by rooting twigs or grafting them to a rootstock rather than from seeds.
The heirloom apple trees that I planted are hybrids that were created as long as 100 years ago. I think it's neat to know that the very trees I planted are a direct living link to the very first trees of each variety as a result of propogation from cuttings. That is, they are genetically identical as a result of the continuous physical link of the living tissue taken from old trees to create the new ones. They are, as it were, all of the same generation even though the first tree is long dead.
The garden presently includes the four apples trees (Malus domestica), an untold number of blackberry briers (Rubus allegheniensis) and four wild grape vines (Vitis reparia) as perennials.
The varieties of apples (Carolina Red June, Virginia Beauty, Magnum Bonum, and Black Limbertwig) in the Hillside Garden are but four of about 7500 named varieties worldwide! Apple trees of the same variety will not pollinate one another and that's why an apple orchard must always have at least two varities of apple trees. Yet, when the pollen from, say, a Magnum Bonum pollinates a Virginia Beauty, the resulting apple seeds are a Magnum Bonum-Virginia Beauty hybrid. (The fruit itself, in this case, is always a Virginia Beauty, regardless of the variety of pollen.) Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but you would need to plant the seed and wait 8 or 10 years for a tree from that seed to bear fruit to know whether it's a good hybrid. Accordingly, that's why the various varieties of apple trees are usually propagated by rooting twigs or grafting them to a rootstock rather than from seeds.
The heirloom apple trees that I planted are hybrids that were created as long as 100 years ago. I think it's neat to know that the very trees I planted are a direct living link to the very first trees of each variety as a result of propogation from cuttings. That is, they are genetically identical as a result of the continuous physical link of the living tissue taken from old trees to create the new ones. They are, as it were, all of the same generation even though the first tree is long dead.
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