How To Raise A Fruit Tree

Do you know how to raise a fruit tree? It's not nearly as easy and trouble free as you might think. We tend to lose sight of all the work that has gone on before that allows us to stop be a garden nursery and pick up an already started fruit tree of our choosing.

For a learning experience you are encouraged to grow an apple tree and attempt to make it the best in your neighborhood. In your attempt suppose you try the following plan. In the fall take the seed of an apple, a crab apple is good and keep it in a cool place during the winter. The simplest way to do this is to bury it in damp sand. In the spring plant it in a rich, loose soil.

Great care must be taken of the young shoot as soon as it appears above the ground. You want to make it grow as tall and as straight as possible during this first year of its life, hence you should give it rich soil and protect it from animals. Before the ground freezes in the fall take up the young tree with the soil that was around it and keep it all winter in a cool, damp place.

Now when spring comes it will not do to set out the carefully tended tree, for an apple tree from seed will not be a tree like its parent, but will tend to resemble a more distant ancestor. The distant ancestor that the young apple tree is most likely to take after is the wild apple, which is small, sour, and otherwise far inferior to the fruit we wish to grow. It makes little difference, therefore, what kind of apple seed we plant, since in any event we cannot be sure that the tree grown from it will bear fruit worth having unless we force it to do so.

Fig. 63. A Young Fruit-Grower

Grafting