PUT TOGETHER AN ORCHARD BY YOURSELF!

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The biggest advantage to growing seedling rootstock is that you have the chance to select the most vigorous and hardy seedlings. However, think about timing — it takes a lot longer to grow bearing trees from seeds than from other methods.

To start, remove the seeds from any fully ripened fruit. (A helpful hint: Take the seeds and drop them into a bowl of water; the ones that sink are the ones most likely to grow well.) Once you've removed the seeds, chill them for eight to 10 weeks, then mix the seeds with moist peat moss and keep them in a dark place at about 35°F. (Presumably, the chilling could be done in a refrigerator if you don't have a cold cellar.)

Now as soon as the ground can be worked in the spring, plant the seeds about one inch deep and one foot apart. The vegetable garden is a good place to start the seeds, because they are likely to get the weeding and other attention they need. At the end of the first growing season, remove the least vigorous ones; the next spring, remove any that were damaged by cold over the winter. When the trees are 3/8 inch in diameter at ground level (usually at about two years old), they are large enough for grafting.

Since a rootstock and the material grafted onto it becomes one single organism, the two parts naturally affect each other. The rootstock influences such things as the ultimate size of the tree, its hardiness, the age at which it comes into bearing, and the heaviness of the crop. Some of the most popular types are the dwarfing and semi-dwarfing strains of the Malling series, developed in England. They produce smaller trees, but full-sized fruit. Many Malling rootstock also bring trees into bearing at an earlier age. Be forewarned that some rootstock and grafting stocks are incompatible with each other, and the grafts may not take, or they might succumb to infection. One way to handle this is to use two different rootstocks.

If your orchard site isn't ready, you can plant your rootstock trees in rows at the back of your vegetable garden. Then after the season goes by, just transplant them to the orchard. For example, my rootstock was planted in our garden in Maine, grafted there in August, and then shipped to our new home in Nova Scotia in early November, where they were immediately planted. All survived and grew happily the following season.

We collected all of our grafting stock from three sources. We used the old apple trees from our first place in the country, which held enormous sentimental value for us. We perpetuated two huge, nearly dead trees which bore delicious fruit, one russet and the other golden. Then we found a friendly orchardist in a nearby apple-growing region, a delightful man in his 80s, who knew the history of every tree in his orchard. He told us about the many old variety trees that he owned and planned to replace — Kings, Russets, Ben Davises, Spys, and Wageners.

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