Title says it all, for the most part. We have trimmed this bush back fairly aggressively each year and to us it didn’t stand out as anything special. Grows haphazardly, I don’t recall seeing it flower (although it must have?), leaves and branches aren’t noteworthy. Grows as a bundle of different shoots out of the ground.
Well today my wife pulls up to the house and swears she saw apples on it. She got out of the car and took a closer look and sure enough, our random to us bush has half a dozen apples growing on it in. We couldn’t believe it.
Any clue what it could be? Would love to research further. I don’t recall ever seeing apples growing from something that appeared more “bush” than it did “tree”. What can we do to promote further growth? Do these appear to just be crabapples? The growth kindve reminds me of when you cut a tree down to a stump and then it grows back with many “suckers”.
We’re currently just very, very surprised lol.
TIA!
by MidnightCovfefe
6 Comments
Quince
Forgot to add, greater Portland, Oregon area.
Apples don’t grow true to the parent, so each and every apple seed will grow a new kind of apple tree. When you buy an apple of a certain type, it’s a graft from the parent plant. This could well be that a discarded apple core has grown into a tree. Perhaps the original tree was cut down and the reason its bushy is because the suckers have grown up from the original root system.
Apples and quinces are very closely related. Taste the fruit a couple of times. A lot of pre-modern pomme-fruits require some sort of fermentation to come to anything. This wild stuff is often hardly worth your time. But there is only one way to find out.
It’s having a hard time setting fruit. It needs another pollen source close by. Granny smith genetics cross with a lot of stuff. Maybe get a G/S and a domestically refined (modern) quince.
Bees, bees like plants like purple salvia, lavender, wildflower blends, elderflower etc. Hardware stores sell bee houses for ‘solitary bees’ now. They look like a bird house but with a lot of little wooden circles.
Flat wood, apple spiecies crop on flat wood not vertical wood. Tie vertical woods over to horrizontal to encourage fruit. They crop on two year old wood, so it won’t happen immediately.
Potash of sulphate will encourage fruiting as well.
Suckering, the way you have such a dense cluster potentially indactes a tree used to be there, was cut down, then the root stock suckered up intensely. I don’t know however if your climate is cool enough for natural stratification. Truely wild stuff just grows sometimes.
you can take it to your local ag extension and they can tell you what it is
Op you should pluck it and try and if it sour then you can chop of the trees and plant more edible one