Seedlings from Composted Apples
After seeing lisatelramor‘s post the other day, showing apple seedlings poking out of rotting apples, I remembered just how many fruits I composted directly in the earth below the large Skovfoged apple tree.
I went out to have a look and see if any new life had resulted from this process, and sure enough, I found at least ten dense clusters of apple seedlings. Given that I plant almost every apple seed from fruit I eat, I’ve become quite adept at spotting the cotelydons of pomaceous fruits like these.
I was reminded of the story of the Bloody Ploughman apple, a Scottish cultivar:
The Bloody Ploughman apple (Malus domestica ‘Bloody Ploughman’) - a chance seedling identified in Scotland in the 1880s. A myth surrounding this apple holds that it originated when a ploughman was caught stealing apples from the garden of a nobleman, and was killed on site; his widow was given the apples he stole as compensation for his death, but threw them in the compost in anger. The ‘Bloody Ploughman’ apple is supposedly a chance seedling that grew from those apples.
- A Multi-Graft Apple Tree: Seven red-fleshed cultivars, on one tree
‘Skovfoged’ isn’t my favourite apple by a long stretch: it’s an old mealy Danish cultivar that doesn’t store well, so most of the fruit has ended up being composted in previous years. For this reason, I pollarded the tree last winter, and seeded it with mistletoe, which will suppress fruit production.
The seedlings I found from this tree have been re-potted, and once they have hardened off a little, I will plant them out in the local area. There is no guarantee of the offspring of this tree producing better or worse fruit than the parent I know, and I don’t know what kind of apple tree the other parent is: every apple seedling is a mystery that way.
Any way I look at it though: if local people don’t take to them, the wildlife surely will.
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