North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[dwoodard@becon.org]

Tanis, I deduce that your Beautiful Arcades are BA seedlings and not
the original clonal Beautiful Arcade cultivar. Please correct me if
I am wrong.

Then seedlings of your trees would likely be 1/4 to 1/2 to nearly 
100% Beautiful Arcade and rather variable, rather than 1/2 Beautiful 
Arcade as in the case of the original Nova Scotia seedlings. Much
of their *average* suitability for rootstocks would depend on the
unknown pollen parents in the two generations.

I note that Snow/Fameuse is thought to be a parent of McIntosh, and 
McIntosh seedlings were much used as rootstocks for standard trees
in the old days up to about 1960.

I read in the old books that Tolman Sweet was popular as a hardy
framework in Ontario a hundred years ago.

Probably roguing would be especially important for seedlings of your 
trees; I seem to recall that "F2" seedlings are especially variable.
However, one would expect many of the seedlings to be strong in BA 
characteristics. Some of the seedlings that were slow growing but
looked thrifty might be quite interesting as dwarfing rootstocks.
Root cuttings could be taken later from grafted trees that
performed well after several years.

Can anyone comment on the initial growth rates of successful
dwarfing apple rootstocks compared to vigourous stocks? Is the
dwarfing character closely related to initial growth rate or is it
more closely related to final size and the time taken to reach it?

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, tanis cuff wrote:

> Good points!  Discussion in CAPS.
>
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: dwoodard
> To: North American Fruit Explorers <>
> Subject: Re: [NAFEX] apple & pear seeds to share
> Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 03:16:57 -0400 (EDT)
>
> 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.
> WINTER ZONE 4; I THINK IT'S TECHNICALLY 'HUMID', BUT SUMMERS CAN GET
> DESPAIRINGLY DRY.  THE BEAUTIFUL ARCADES' NEARBY POLLENIZERS ARE MOSTLY NOT
> NAMED, THO ONE HAS TOLMAN SWEET NEARBY PLUS A MCINTOSH OFFSPRING; OTHER HAS
> A SNOW/FAMEUSE W/IN REACH.  ALL OTHER TREES ARE UNKNOWN NAMES, & A FEW
> CHANCE-SEEDLINGS. ALL HAVE LASTED HERE BECAUSE OF ENOUGH DISEASE-TOLERANCE
> TO HELP SURVIVE THE WINTERS AND ENOUGH FLAVOR IN THE FRUITS THAT PEOPLE
> PROPAGATED THE TREES.
>
> 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.
> THANKS!  I'VE BEEN GARDENING & WEEDING ALL MY LIFE, SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE
> OCCURRED TO ME TO TELL SOMEONE "YOU'LL HAVE TO WEED"!
> ESPECIALLY THE PEAR SEEDLINGS SHOULD BE ROGUED, TO REMOVE THE HIGHEST-VIGOR
> SEEDLINGS: HIGH-VIGOR ROOTSTOCKS WILL TEND TO GROW HIGH-VIGOR MONSTER PEAR
> TREES.
>
> 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.
> I CAN CONFIRM MINE ARE SEMI-DWARF ROOTSTOCKS, W/ A GOOD RANGE OF
> COMPATABILITY FOR APPLE (I'VE HAD SOME REJECTIONS AFTER 3, 4, 5 YEARS).  BUT
> MINE PRODUCE A SMALL RED APPLE-- MIGHT CALL THEM APPLE-CRABS-- LATE-SEPT,
> EARLY OCT.  GOOD TART FLAVOR.
>
> I ACQUIRED MY BEAUTIFUL ARCADE ROOTSTOCKS IN LATE 80s OR 1990 FROM A
> NAFEXER, OR 2ND-PERSON THRU NAFEX.  SORRY, I DIDN'T THINK TO ASK ABOUT
> POLLEN PARENT!  THEY ARE PERFORMING WELL IN SANDY-LOAM, AND DON'T SEEM TO
> SUFFER WHERE SPRING SNOW-MELT OCCASIONALLY FLOODS 1/2 THE ROOT ZONES.
>
> Doug Woodard
> St. Catharines, Ontario
> Niagara Peninsula