North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Alan Haigh <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

Charles wrote,  "For the scientific approach, I have continued my
experimental procedure with
the seedlings and developed seedlings to out perform any grafted tree
available for our climatic zone"

Charles, I am not arguing about the success of your breeding strategies
only against the certainty of your conclusions- the how can be correct when
the why is wrong.

To my thinking, a scientific approach to determine if a grafted tree is
less cold hardy than a similar seedling tree would be to start with a
seedling tree that has proven its cold hardiness.  You would take a hundred
seedlings of that variety and graft half of them with scion wood of the
proven tree and leave the other fifty as the control.  Then you could
compare their hardiness over the next twenty years.

While the experiment would be imperfect for a few reasons it would provide
a far more accurate manner of testing your opinion, and, I think, could be
correctly described as a scientific approach.

Without a control your logical conclusions drawn from years of experience
are opinions that may be true but don't represent a scientific approach, in
my opinion.  Of course, this site is mostly about discussing the personal
experiences of various fruit fanatics and that's what I come here for.

What got me started on this train of thought was the original claims of
this topic- that grafted trees create a product that is dangerous to human
health by a man who I think stated that he actually left the country
because he was so upset that his idea isn't widely embraced here.

The main basis of his belief seemed to be that he had health problems that
quickly cleared up when he stopped eating fruit from grafted trees.   I
don't blame him for deciding not to eat grafted tree fruit but I need a lot
more evidence than that to throw out all the advantages provided by
grafting.  Whether these advantages pertain to cold zone nut production, I
have no idea, but it still seems logical that if you ever find a really
standout tree for quality, cold hardiness, and productivity you will end up
trying to graft it onto other trees.

Arriving at such a standout tree has historically often taken centuries as
can be seen by those trying to obtain the qualities of selected Kakis in a
native American persimmon.  How many generations of grafters/seedling
growers were required to turn an Asian pear into a Bosc?

That said, I wish you'd explain your technique of getting your seedling
nut trees to produce within 3 or 4 years.  I know of a variety of ways to
accelerate fruiting of the species I manage (scoring, branch spreading,
root pruning, pruning out excessively vigorous branches, etc) but am
curious if you've discovered something new that you are using on nut trees.