North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[dwoodard@becon.org]

M13 has been represented to be tolerant to moist soils. I believe that the 
Geneva station did some work with it in the past. I don't know whether it
is still available in the U.S.

I imagine that M13 would be the standard to beat.

I have heard that Dutchess of Oldenburg (Charlamovsky?) seedlings tend to 
be tolerant of moist soils.

My guess is that there is plenty of suitable apple orchard land
available right now, especially given imports from China etc. I also 
wonder if soils subject to flooding would be as productive as better 
drained soils even if the trees did survive. Finally, I think most
soils subject to flooding would be in river valleys and would suffer from 
poor air drainage and therefor from unseasonable frosts. Some exceptions
might be land beside large bodies of water. I think that a principle
region where such roostocks are valued is the low-lying land in the Elbe 
estuary near Hamburg in Germany, somewhat protected from frost by the 
estuary and its nearness to the North Sea.

Now, some decades hence when we are on the backside of the oil peak and 
transportation is more expensive, local production is likely to be more 
important. Eventually due to resource shortages our economy may have to be 
reorganize on more of a subsistence basis. I can see late-blooming 
cultivars getting more attention. Then flood-tolerant rootstocks 
might be of wider interest, but it will take a while. Don't expect to get 
rich, If you can afford it and the material can be preserved, it may be 
useful work.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, tanis cuff wrote:

> Please & thanks for your views of the current need or market demand for a 
> very flood-tolerant apple rootstock.