Kitchen Garden Forum

I was reading an item about food branding In today's Telegraph, specifically mentioning Pink Lady apples for which growers have to be licenced and which can only be grown in climatic reigns which have 200 days of sunlight to produce their pink skin colour.

Just out of interest this made me wonder me if it would be possible to grow these apples, or any other variety, from a pip, and would they eventually successfully bear crops?. (Probably not in my lifetime !!). I remember when I was younger people often tried to grow avocado trees from their stones but I doubt whether anybody ever succeeded in getting a tree to survive or crop because they need much a warmer climate than ours.

You would get a tree, but what sort of fruit it would bear is anyone's guess.

That is why all top fruit is propagated by grafting onto rootstocks.

When we first got married many years ago there was an apple tree in the garden of my inlaws which was grown from a pip by my wife when she was around 3 years old, my father in law wanted to cut it down as it was getting to big for the garden, I dug it up carried it on my shoulder around 1 mile to our house dug a large hole and planted it, it gave us a good supply of apples for around 3 years when to my surprise my wife cut it down she said it was shading everything, some people are just not sentimental

Primrose wrote:I was younger people often tried to grow avocado trees from their stones but I doubt whether anybody ever succeeded in getting a tree to survive or crop because they need much a warmer climate than ours.

If you've ever visited Nymans in West Sussex, there's one growing outside there. It's quite sizeable but it's no good really — we don't have the climate for avocados by any stretch. Each winter, parts of it are killed off, so it's rather ugly, too, missing many limbs.

Apples, pears, plums — they none of them come true from seed, which is why they are budded or grafted. Which isn't to say you shouldn't attempt growing from a pip, which is how some of our more famous varieties came about: Bramley's Seedling (to give it its full name), Cox's Orange Pippin. Peaches, though, come true from a stone. However, they're better grown on a rootstock to control their vigour.