Blog: My own Johnny Appleseed experience
Don’t expect shop-quality fruit if you’re growing an apple tree from a pip. You’ll need a lot of patience and minimal house moves! However, none of those things were in my mind as a kid. I planted a pip from the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple I was eating into a small pot of soil in the back yard (the concrete Tyneside type, not the USA kind).
My first real foray into what now would be called children’s gardening or container gardening, the pip did germinate. I looked after it, potting it on into bigger and bigger pots until it ended up in a sawn-off catering vegetable oil container (I’ll recycle anything). There it stayed until I bought this house, which I moved into in March 1988.
And the apple tree moved too…
As it was still in a reasonably small tub, the tree came too, and it was planted in the garden. More than 30 years later, it’s still here and flowers most years, giving me a decent crop of Cox-like apples (not identical to the parent, though).
It’s riddled with cankers and woolly aphid, but I don’t have the heart to chop it down – we’ve travelled too far together. Besides, it’s now home to a lovely Claire Austin climbing rose from David Austin Roses, which covers up the worst bits!
Hi,
I also have a massive apple tree that bares lovely tasting apples, grown from a pip out of my apple when I was 8, I am now 51. I haven’t pruned it as didn’t know how and it is definitely growing wild and leaning (due to someone building a house next to my garden and blocking the day long sun down to half a day 🙁 .
I think it needs some attention but I’m scared of killing it off. And yes |I can never sell the garden as I couldn’t bare to see anyone chop my tree down.
Any tips would be helpful thanks.
Rachel Frost
Thank you! Renovating an apple tree takes time – spread the pruning over 3-4 years. If you cut it back all in one go, you’ll get lots of watershoots which don’t bear fruit. Here are my tips on pruning – https://www.mandycanudigit.com/fruit/growing-apples-and-pears/