North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[dwoodard@becon.org]

Tanis, the pollen parent affects the hardiness of apple tree offspring
as well as the seed parent. If it's not too tedious, it might be
helpful if you could tell us the names of the cultivars you have
growing near your Beautiful Arcades, and maybe something about
the climate in your part of Wisconsin.

I understand that in Nova Scotia where the practice of using seedling 
Beautiful Arcade trees as rootstock originated (their BAs are planted
with Antonovkas) it is considered necessary to rogue the BA seedlings
and discard about 20%, the ones that are unusually big or small.
I would guess that they take care to grow them in uniform soil and
sun and at uniform spacing.

If anyone hasn't heard of them, Beautiful Arcade is an old Russian
summer apple, fairly hardy. The Kentville Nova Scotia station of 
Agriculture Canada found some decades ago that selected Beautiful
Arcade seedlings made a satisfactory semidwarf apple rootstock for
the Annapolis Valley soil (clay I believe) and climate.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario
Niagara Peninsula


On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, tanis cuff wrote:

> I collected seeds of pear & apple this fall, to grow for rootstocks, if not
> for that future chance-seedling w/ perfect fruit & disease resistances.  I
> won't guarantee those expectations, but I do have 50 to 100 seeds of a
> couple 'Beautiful Arcade' apples, & a couple local drought-tolerant
> chance-seedlings (that's WISCONSIN 'drought' tolerance!), and plenty of
> communis pear.
>
> Email offlist.  Unless I've sent you seeds in the past, and you have some
> observations/ suggestions for improvements in packaging, padding, shipper,
> etc.-- then please post to the list!