Kleffman Apple

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Years ago, and by that I mean 9 years ago, I saved several hundred apples seeds, all from Fireside apples harvested at Homestead Orchard.  I folded them into damp paper toweling, placed the paper toweling into freezer bags, and left them in the crisper in our fridge.  This was my version of stratification, and though I have learned now that freezing them in damp sand for three months works better, this was the method I used.

Around late February some of the seeds started sprouting, so I checked the bags every couple of days, and my daughter Nell (at the time nearly 3 years old) and I would carefully plant them each into pots which then would wait patiently on our windowsill for spring.  We ended up with a lot of baby seedling trees.  We filled up the raised garden bed on the west side of our back yard with them, and gave a lot to a friend who was creating a wildlife forage area on a large farm he manages for white tail deer hunting.

At the end of the first summer we had a garden bed full of young saplings, which then for the most part I dug up.  I had some idea in my mind of making a big orchard at my parent’s B&B down in Redwing, and I transplanted about 20 of the trees out to the far eastern side of their field, leaving 4 trees in the back garden at my own home, and 1 tree that I transplanted to our front yard.

At some point a few years later, I stopped doing this because I was told again and again that there was no point really to growing apple trees from seed because the chances of getting a fair table apple were 1/400, so it made sense to leave the development of apple trees to places like The University of Minnesota, which has introduced most of the modern apples grown in our region.  Everyone seemed pretty adamant about that fact.  No one had the family orchards grown from seed any more because everyone wants specific types of apples, and it takes too long to get a tree from seed to production in the first place, much less the issue that then chances of having something you can just eat off the tree being remote.

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Well, I cannot say that definitively I have proven anyone wrong about all of those facts, but I seem to have beat the odds.  This spring the one tree left in my backyard (I dug up and transplanted the others down to my parent’s 2 years ago) and the one in my front yard both flowered and set fruits.  The tree in the backyard set and produced apples as fine in appearance as any we see in the orchard, with a nice red coloring and a greenish/yellow around the stem.IMG_2127

The tree in our front yard produced crab type apples which are a bit larger than a quarter in diameter.  I have not yet found these apples to be edible, they are just now starting to blush a slight red, and I have no idea if they will ripen into something better than wildlife foraging food or if it is just a nice tree with flowers in the spring.

However …

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… the tree in the backyard is a fine crisp fleshed apple with a wonderful combination of sweet and tartness which I would happily pick bushels and bushels of in an orchard if it was available.  Both Patti and I agreed that as far as taste went, it ranks in our personal opinions with Honeycrisp and Fireside.

Now, that being said, we now need to propagate it, and NOT by seed.  We want more of the same apples, and although I have skimmed articles and diagrams, I have never actually grafted an apple tree (or any tree for that matter) nor do I have any rootstock available here to graft anything on to.

So maybe that is my project for the winter: learning how to clone apple trees through grafting.  I dont think we are going to stay at this house forever, and this tree has got to the point where moving it would be quite an endeavor.

Patti and I played around with various names, but I have kind of settled on just calling it Kleffman, though not after me.  I found out this summer from my cousin Sue Anderson, that her father, my uncle David Kleffman, had a small orchard at his home outside of Hibbing Minnesota where he had a cluster of grafted trees he had developed himself.  He died about the same time that Nell and I were planting our first sprouted seeds into pots, and to be honest I never knew about his orchard.  The orchard was removed by another of his daughters when she moved out to the home, much to the horror of his daughter Sue who told me she would have paid to have some of the trees saved and moved to her own home, but was never given the chance.

So, if anything comes of this tree, and I can multiply its number, the first person who gets one is my cousin Sue, because it is named after her dad and his love of doing something I don’t really know how to do, and just got lucky.

I was going to end the blog posting there, but I wanted to add on about the other trees from that year.  Of the initial 20 trees I planted out at my parent’s home, all but 1 was destroyed completely by gophers or deer.  The one surviving tree is not much more than a bushing shrub due to it being topped every year by the deer who find it.  Of the later moving of 4 larger trees from my backyard to their home, two have survived, but have not yet blossomed, much less set fruits.  Maybe next spring they will have recovered enough from the transplanting to do something, and I am curious to see if and what they produce.  Of all the seedlings given to my friend that manages an area for deer hunting, he honestly does not know if any survived as he has planted hundreds of others, and has never really taken the time to follow individual trees.

 

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2 Responses to Kleffman Apple

  1. David Macgregor says:

    Tom:

    Found your site via Homegrown Goodness which was found chasing down info on Glass Gem. I am a commercial apple grower , and breeder, in central MN and do most of my own tree propagation. If you would like a tree or two or few of your apple grafted I would be happy to do that for you. I do have an ulterior motive, I’d like seed of your flour corns when they are available, i.e. Mandan flour, Wanneheza, and Iroquois white. I grew some Florianna red, an Italian polenta flint last year but would like to grow some real flour corn for easier grinding and parching. I have some apple rootstock here so all you need do is send budwood next summer. I’d send the stock with the bud grafted into it the next spring and you’d take it from there. Fruit in about five years on dwarf stock. Let me know if you’re interested.

    Dave

    • Tom says:

      HI Dave,

      In exchange for the corn seed (can’t give you Wamneheza, but the rest I can) would you teach me how to graft trees?

      Tom