North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

The number of cotyledons isn't an indication of the chromosome number, though the plant description sounds like it might be a polyploid of some sort.  
It's interesting to note that Luther Burbank claimed that seedlings with the largest leaves, best vigor, etc. were the ones that had the best fruit.  You might graft some of your seedling on a dwarf stock like M26 to get it into bearing sooner, to find out.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003.
On May 13, 2005, at 12:18 AM, <leclair@verizon.net> wrote:

I have a small apple orchard in Maine and I decided to grow some new trees from seed. Now, I'm not looking to grow great or exceptional apples; just ones good enough for cider or cooking.  If the trees don't make good apples, I'll just top graft them with other varieties.  

Right now, I have a little over a hundred seedlings.  Most of them look like average ordinary antonovka rootstock seedlings with small average leaves.  Some of them have tiny skinny leaves that look like the ones on certain small crabapples.  

And one of the seedlings has three cotelydons.  This one is almost twice as tall as the average with much larger and broader leaves.  The leaves also have much larger teeth than the average leaf.

The third cotelydon folded out from in between the other two "standard" cotelydons to form a "Y" shape.  The plant is at about the same stage as the rest of the seedlings with about the same number of leaves, etc., except everything is larger.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that a standard apple tree has 34 chromosomes.

Also, it is my understanding (based on memories of botany class way back in school) that one of the cotelydons in a dicot has the genes from one of its parents, while the other cotelydon has the genes from the other parent. 

So, if this is the case in this seedling as well as standard dicots, my seedling should have 51 chromosomes, the same number that triploids have.  

So my roundabout question is, does three cotelydons make a triploid? 

Also, what are the odds of having good fruit from this tree?

Any info would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Nick