PERMABREED

 Malus sieversii. This is my little three coloured malus sieversii apple when it was young. Now i am trying to multiply it by approach grafting. The ornamental value of this tree is off the charts. Incredible leaf colours. This was at the end of last year. Now i am approach grafting it onto another apple rootstock. I did the grafting on the 6th of march and plan to cut them off on the 6th of june. In spring the leaves are green with a little red on the edges but each year they then display spectacular colours. The problem is the plant is not very vigourous and we don't know what the fruit will be like. Here you can see that the rootstock makes larger leaves than the three coloured apple. I found this individual in 428 seed-grown malus sieversii. Malus sieversii is incredibly diverse genetically as you can see in the next picture. These are malus sieversii seedlings displaying huge diversity.

 I weeded all my malus sieversii trees and i lost quite a few to what i believe was a combination of deer, rabbit and rodent attacks. I think i lost between one fourth and one third of the 426 plants i grew from seed. I discovered some visually very amazing and different ones in two of the six seed batches. I singled out several unique ones that i planted in my polytunnel to grow them properly. I didn't have the time to protect the 426 as i would have liked to. All trees of the 4 other batches have basically green leaves. Here is one example. This is a very nice green leaved one. And another green leaved one. Already these two are different in leaf colour and shape. But i selected them from the batches where all had green leaves in order to be sure to have genetic diversity. I kept 18 seedlings in the polytunnel that contain some of every batch. The following ones are very special and unique and display many variations of red and green and even other colours. One seedling with nice...

Malus sieversii. I got a grafted malus sieversii that supposedly makes really nice fruit so i planted it recently. I made an effort to protect it really well since i get a lot of damage from deer. Malus sieversii was found to be the ancestor of all modern apples. Trees were found in kazakhstan that were estimated to be 4 to 5 hundred years old. Trees of 30 meters height! (98 feet) were also discovered. When the apple made its way to the modern world a lot of genetic diversity was lost in the process and nowadays malus sieversii is being used widely in apple breeding to reintroduce disease resistance and other useful traits into modern varieties.