Propagation By Seed

When it is intended to raise stocks to be engrafted, the only matter to be observed in selecting the seed is, that it be from vigorous healthy trees. Keep the seed in sand, or earth moderately damp, during autumn and winter, and sow quite early in the spring, and in drills, so as to admit of more easy culture. The second season the young stocks may be transplanted, and again the third season, each transplantation tending to secure success on the final transfer to the orchard ground.) When three years old, they will be, if well managed, stout stocks, ready for grafting.

Where the object is to produce new varieties, select the seed from favourite fruits and sow as above directed.

If it be the purpose to allow the seedlings to bear/they may be suffered to remain where they have first grown, or they may he transplanted to any other position. But a more speedy method to reach results is to graft a shoot of the seedling in a branch of a vigorous tree. The second season fruit may be obtained, especially if the shoot is bent downwards, or inclined, so as to arrest the free flow of sap, which would rather tend to preserve wood than fruit. By this means curiosity can be early satisfied, and those which prove worthless, by far the larger portion, cast out as cumberers of the ground.

Mr. Knight states that "the width and thickness of the leaf generally indicates the size of the future apple, but will by no means convey any correct idea of the merits of the future fruit.

"When these have the character of high cultivation, the qualities of the fruit will be far removed from those of the native species; but the apple may be insipid or highly flavoured, green or deeply coloured, and of course well or ill-calculated to answer the purposes of the planter. An early blossom in the spring, and an early change of colour in the autumnal leaf, would naturally be supposed to indicate a fruit of early maturity, but I have never been able to discover any criterion of this kind on which the smallest dependence may be placed. The leaves of some varieties will become yellow and fall off, leaving the fruit green and immature; and the leaves in other kinds will retain their verdure long after the fruit has perished. The plants whose buds in the annual wood are full and prominent are usually more productive than those whose buds are small and shrunk in the bark; but their future produce will depend much on the power the blossoms possess of bearing the cold, and this power varies in the varieties, and can only be known from experience.

Those which produce their leaves and blossoms rather early in the spring are generally to be preferred, for, though they are more exposed to injury from frost, they less frequently suffer from the attacks of insects- the more common cause of ailure. The disposition to vegetate early or late in the spring, is, like almost every other quality in the apple tree, transferred in different degrees to its offspring; and the planter must therefore seek those qualities in the parent tree which he wishes to find in the future seedling plants. The best method I have been able to discover of obtaining such fruits as vegetate very early in the spring, has been by introducing the farina of the Siberian Crab into the blossom of a rich and early apple, and by transferring, in the same manner, the farina of the apple to the blossom of the Siberian Crab. The leaf and the habit of many of the plants that I have thus obtained, possess much of the character of the apple, whilst they vegetate as early in the spring as the crab of Siberia, and possess at least an equal power of bearing cold; and I possess two plants of the family which are quite as hardy as the most austere crab of our woods".